Well, this is a bit of an anti-climax. I was all set to have The Meg as my centrepiece for this whole Shark Week (2: Shark Harder) thing... and then they go and announce that it's going to be a bloodless PG-13 (or 12A in my neck of the woods). Now I'm not saying that a movie needs blood and guts to be any good, far from it - but this is a sharksploitation movie featuring a prehistoric shark. Not to mention that the book it was based on apparently had quite a few gory deaths. It just smacks of attempting to make a movie more family-friendly for the sake of getting a larger audience for a summer b-movie.
Five years after a deep-sea rescue went wrong and cost the lives of his two friends, Jonas Taylor spends his days drinking beer in a run-down bar in Thailand. He is persuaded to return to rescue diving by an old friend, Mac, and Dr Minway Zhang, who need his help after a deep-sea exploration submarine becomes trapped deep in the Marianas Trench. The pilot of the submersible also just so happens to be Taylor's ex-wife, which is what eventually convinces him to attempt the rescue. The operation goes relatively successfully, with only one death, but while they are down there they realise that they are being attacked by a Megalodon - a prehistoric shark measuring around 25 metres long. Once back on the surface, they also realise that the Megalodon has managed to follow them up and is now swimming freely around the sea and devouring everything it comes across. Taylor and the members of the research facility have to come up with a way to stop the Megalodon before it reaches a populated area and turns it into an all-you-can-eat buffet...
The Meg is a b-movie, pure and simple. Of course, all sharksploitation movies are b-movies, even the one that started them all off, Jaws, but The Meg is the biggest one for at least the last 40 years or so. I mean, it contains a dinosaur shark, and thus is wearing its pulpy, b-movie credentials on its sleeve. Not to mention that its (human) star is Jason Statham, one of those actors who will always be playing hard men in gritty gangster movies or postmodern mercenary movies like The Expendables (Other names previously attached to the film included George Clooney and Eli Roth, who at one point wanted to direct and star). So, big star, big shark, big effects... summer b-movie. However, for a movie that has some admittedly spectacular giant shark setpieces, it is also, as I said above, very light on blood. This is a particularly egregious sin when it comes to the film's big "money shot" scene when the Megalodon makes its way to a crowded beach and... Well, I think it's supposed to be feeding on the hapless beachgoers trapped in the water, but the complete lack of blood really makes you question that. It doesn't matter what we've seen the Megalodon chew through before (whales, billionaires et al), the bloodlessness of this scene takes away any and all threat and fear we might have for the human plankton trapped in the water. I do understand that The Meg is a summer blockbuster more than a B-movie sharksploitation film and with that comes a need to be more "family-friendly", but I also think it was a mistake that cost the film dearly.
On the other hand, The Meg remembers where it came from, and honours that granddaddy of all sharksploitation movies, Jaws, during the film - and in some pretty clever ways. I admit I was sitting and watching the film waiting for someone to announce that a bigger boat was needed, but the film was smarter than that. There's a dog called Pippin, and a scene involving a young boy and his mother on the beach that's almost a shot-for-shot reproduction of the scene in Jaws when poor Alex Kintner asks his mother if he can go play in the sea. To find out whether these scenes play out as they did in the 1975 film, you'll have to watch The Meg yourself, but I will say that I appreciated the film not going for the obvious, low-hanging fruit references.
A brief word on Ruby Rose. She plays engineer Jaxx in the film, and while I might have been mistaken I don't think the character is explicitly referred to by a specific gender throughout the film. Taking into account Rose's real-life genderfluidity, I found that to be quite a nice touch (although as I said, I might have missed something somewhere and so this is all in my head). I know she sometimes gets criticised for a perceived lack of acting talent, but I found her to be acceptable enough in The Meg.
The Meg has already been a successful enough summer blockbuster (it recently topped Solo: A Star Wars Story in terms of money made) and for some that might be enough to declare a film both "good" and a success. But I still feel that by neutering it and removing most of the blood and gore, the film was lessened considerably and didn't manage to come close to its true potential. Perhaps we'll get a different version when it's released on DVD/Blu-ray with all the blood added back in, and we'll be able to see then if I'm right. But until then I still feel disappointed by it all.
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