Reviews

This might have been a good movie if someone could hold a camera steady! All through the movie, every seen in fact, had some degree of camera movement. At times, it was ridiculous, the action was just a blur of arms, legs and I think the camera operator was fighting with some one off-screen or had a terrible case of Parkinson's disease. Very disappointing, the director of photography Oliver Wood needs to go back to school and get a clue. Not everyone is a MTV junkie that is suffering from Attention Deficit Disorder. Why does Hollywood seem to think that shaking a camera during a action seen will make it better? Remember the good old days of tripods and action that was good enough on it's own to be entertaining… TM

What is wrong with director John Lafia? Any chance of this film being any good was destroyed by the constant zoom in and zoom out. I have not seen many home movies filmed this bad. The constant zooming was so annoying that after an hour I had to turn it off. Of the hour I did watch the acting and dialog was unbearable. I really can't say if it got any better but the first hour was dreadful!

What is wrong with the directors in Hollywood now days? Why do they insist that all action scenes need to be filmed with a shaking camera or zooming all over the place (like MI:3)?

I liked the old days when good acting and action carried the scene not the blurred shaky camera work of today!

The following quotes, from other voters, say it all for me… "Every director seems to be keen to use shaky cams these days, and it is very annoying/nauseating"

"camera is shaking about and moving like a flimsy tree in the middle of a hurricane what the hell is the point of this it only distracts you from the film, the story - what story??, and ruins the atmosphere."

"Didn't like J.J. Abrams direction of the camera, it was shaky the whole time and you couldn't focus on the characters" "After about 10-15 minutes you have figured out the whole plot already and this with a disturbing dizziness from the constant shaking camera. The whole film, by the way, feel like a middle-thing of a made-for-TV-movie and blockbuster, but mostly, the plot feels like a elongated episode of a regular TV-show. Worst is the ending, it ends very mildly, and it plays right in to the spectators most obvious prediction."

"held camera work makes me want to walk out and get my money back."

"The movie itself was fine, Tom and the stunts were all good, it was just the director I didn't like for the direction of the cameras."

"Do Directors not understand that they are loosing about 30% of their viewing audience because their awful camera work makes viewers car sick?"

"I don't watch Lost, I don't watch Alias, and I don't watch CSI NY because the directors don't know how to hold a camera still."

"Apparently the movie tries to copy the shaking cameras from Bourne Supremacy. This technique leaves me nauseated. The other technique that irritates me a lot is the extreme close up." "camera shaking that would rival withdrawal symptoms"

"the camera is too shaky and jittery so you sometimes get disoriented."

"unfortunately, director Abrams doesn't believe in keeping the camera in the same space for more than two seconds. The camera NEVER stops moving. During some of the most intense action scenes in fact, the camera shakes so bad, you'd think it was sitting on top of a blender. Michael Bay's cameras don't move this much."

"What really got to me, though, was the actual presentation, filming, and editing. It seems that every action shot; i.e., scenes involving car chases, crashes, shoot-outs, and fights, lasted a second or two, and the camera was within a few inches of the action. Most of the time I couldn't tell what was really happening as from an observer's point of view - everything was right up to my face and the segments too short lasting." "What Action!? Shaking Michael Bay style camera work where you can't make out anything. That is not an action sequence." "the camera shook every second of every action scene such that we completely understood nothing." "There are a few parts where the shaky camera left me wondering what the hell was going on" "The camera work is way too over done in the action, making it difficult to discern what is going on" "Too much of the film is shot as if it were a TV show, focusing on tight facial close-ups even when it might have been better to show the characters in space. There's seems also--to my tastes--to have been an over-reliance on hand-held cameras." "The filming was dark and the camera was vibrating constantly, making it difficult for the viewer to focus on any single moment (much like a music video). I ended up with fatigued vision and a headache." "Camera work is the worst I can remember for a big budget movie."

Boring, ridicules and stupid "Submerged" is a waste of time. The shootouts were a joke, real people do not just stand out in the open with out any cover, hoping to get shot first! So many things wrong or bad, not worth the effort to list, except one major flaw. At 500 mph for 20 minutes = about 166 miles west of L.A. and the water is 100ft deep??? Even at that, none of the people would have survived the decompression from being subjected to 100ft of water pressure for more then 20 hours when they were brought up. Just a awful.