The Rig

Oil Rigs out at sea have always been a point of fascination with film makers.  Isolated from immediate help and directly interacting with the mysteries of the deep.  True, it's for corporate interests but do you think we'll really go into space just cause it's pretty?  Earlier this year I was watching this:




Now that's real, and that's mysterious and creepy.  Think about all the things a screen writer can have invading an oil platform.  An isolated oil platform.  An isolated oil platform in the middle of a storm, and you have the modern equivalent of the old dark house.

I think the first time I saw this background being used was in "The Intruder Within," which was an eighties tv movie that was basically doing a rip on "Alien."  There have been several others including one involving shape changing slime, and another involving eel like thingamabobies. 

Now we have "The Rig."  It's pretty par for course, there's a storm.  People are leaving.  The skeleton crew is just one big family with enough bicker and getting it on for spice.  Up comes the devil in the shape of sort of eely humanid and people start going down.  So let's get to the particulars.  The monster looks fairily convincing and is not for the most part a CGI effect.  The actors are ok but nothing stellar.  Their characters are not rhode scholars but once made aware of a killer eely humanid don't do tooo much to embarrass themselves with early death.  The director keeps it moving nicely and manages to kill to rather suspensefully for a film which we know every action five steps before it happens. Extra points for the beginning which has a nice video prolog giving the beastie a good reason to be annoyed (they drilled into it.)

So if you like your fishy monsters this falls right in the range of a good fish stick.  Nourishing yet bad for you, tasty but not lobster.  Give 'er a whirl.