Open Water/Open Water 2

Open Water was a cool movie on a shoestring budget about the terror that comes with being alone in the water with a bunch of hungry sharks. It may rely heavily on shots during which the waves crash over the camera to reveal a shark lurking below, but it's a cool enough effect. Plus, one scene has Blanchard Ryan with some full frontal.

Open Water 2, largely based on the success of the first one, got a budget of roughly $2 Million. What the creators of this movie did with that money is an absolute abomination. Let's start with the ridiculous fact that somehow the 6 stupidest people on the planet (along with the worst mother) somehow are all on the same boat at the same time. Fast forward 20 minutes and they are all swimming in the water and they forgot to put the ladder down! However, not to worry. They have a knife, a life preserver, a precariously low-hanging American Flag on the boat and an inflatable dolphin. Any six of us in the same situation would have:

a. Had one of the girls on the shoulders of the lightest guy who could support her weight while the lightest guy was sitting on the inflatable dolphin wearing the life preserver. The other four would be there to make sure the guy supporting her weight could not sink. Girl stands on his shoulders and boom, movie over.

b. Stuck the knife in the side of the boat in the crevice between the ladder hatch and the side of the boat and used it as a foothold or something a guy could hold onto while a girl climbed on his shoulders. Movie over.

c. Constructed a rope from our swimsuits with the knife tied at the end and keep throwing it above deck until it caught. We would then, rather than have the heaviest guy in the water climb up on it, have the lightest girl climb up on it. Movie over.

d. Provided that one of us dies, put the life preserver on the dead body and use it as a surfboard to stand on and grab the edge of the boat. The others would make sure the dead body did not sink too much. The life preserver would do the rest. Movie over.

However, these people lacked any common sense and pretty much killed themselves one-by-one. I guess I couldn't expect any of them to think like this as they all had no will to l live. One lady even decides she is going to swim for shore because dying treading water just isn't her style. Another guy goes to die because he feels to blame for the other deaths, but fails to realize that he is now leaving a mother (who is afraid of the water so has never been on a boat since the age of 6) and her baby to try to navigate this boat to shore.

I can forgive everything I have mentioned previously. What I cannot forgive is the ending. It literally made no sense. I have spent 2-3  hours on the internet reading various theories on what the fuck the ending meant, but none of them really hold any water(!). Let me try to explain what I see happening;

The mother, who just go back to her crying baby, jumps back into the water to try to save her friend who has just given up on saving himself. She struggles to drag him back on the boat as scenes of her 6-year-old self struggling to save her dad from drowning are intercut. It goes dark, followed by a very sunny scene (presumably the next day). In this scene, we hear the baby crying, see a fishing boat pass by the idiot boat. No one is on board, but we see that the ladder is down and extended. The fisherman yells ahoy and no one answers. The baby continues to cry. Before I get to the next scene, I would just like to point out that if the ladder is finally extended (in no other scene previously was it extended), then the mother had to have gotten back on the boat. However, when the fisherman passes, the baby is crying and no one else is anywhere to be seen. If the ladder were not extended, I would assume that the mother is dead.

And then the next scene validates my opinion that this is the worst movie ever made. It's still sunny and the mother is on board, with the baby still crying, nowhere to be seen, and the camera pans down to show the man's body she presumably saved from the water. Only he is lying face down, looking exhausted or dead. As this scene is shown after and not before the fisherman, there are only two possibilities here. They either were below deck taking a nap while the fisherman screams ahoy, in which case, why is the guy all of the sudden on the top deck face down, or this scene takes place prior to the fisherman in the continuity. If so, did she drag the dead body below deck for some reason? Did she push it off the side of the boat because she was afraid 2 adults were enough weight to sink a yacht? Some might defend why this movie was made, but no one can defend this terrible ending.