"With strange aeons even death may die."

A monster of vaguely anthropoid outline, but with an octopus-like head whose face was a mass of feelers, a scaly, rubbery-looking body, prodigious claws on hind and fore feet, and long, narrow wings behind.

 H.P. Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu

“He was written in the script as a big, whale-like creature. A massive behemoth – it was called The Behemoth. And in designing the movie – we were done shooting, but we obviously never shot the behemoth cause we were gonna do him later – I just basically was like… we were early enough in the design that was able to shift more to a mystical being. So that’s where we started going Lovecraftian. So I was like alright, [we’re] making Cthulhu here.”

Director William Eubank, Underwater

Whenever I travel, I generally load a few movies onto my iPad, just in case the inflight options leave something to be desired.  For this year's trip to Disneyland, one of my entertainment choices was Underwater, the 2020 science fiction horror film starring Kristen Stewart, and I ended up watching it on our flight to Anaheim today.

At the time of its original release, Underwater failed to perform at the box office, with an international gross of $41 million against a budget of about $65 million.  Personally, I rather liked the film, in spite of its poor reception - it might not break any new ground in terms of moviemaking, but I appreciated its abruptly disastrous opening scene, the underwater sequences are well shot and surprisingly claustrophobic, it has good art direction, and its little repertoire cast does strong work with a bare-bones plot. 

Kristen Stewart brings a lot to the table in terms of acting ability in her portrayal of mournfully defiant mechanical engineer Norah Price - at first I felt that she was slumming a little bit in doing a monster/horror genre film like this, but I can't deny that she doesn't hold back in her performance.

But, all other comments aside, I was completely unaware that Underwater was a Cthulhu Mythos film - the gigantic humanoid monster that dominates the climax of the film is never explicitly identified as H. P. Lovecraft's Great Cthulhu, but in context, it's obvious that it's based on the Great Old One who lies dreaming in R'lyeh. (Thereby making the smaller creatures the Deep Ones from the Mythos.)

However, it's really more of a cameo than a starring role. As far as I know, Lovecraft's short fiction is now in the public domain* - let's stop wasting our time doing horror versions of Winnie the Pooh, isn't it time that someone does the definitive Mythos film that we've all been waiting for?

- Sid

* I have the impression that there's some grey area here legally speaking - Lovecraft's work may be public domain, but there have been enough comics, games, and tributes referencing Cthulhu that there may be some challenges regarding explicit use of the name.