Saturday 27 January 2018

Another Day, Another Shark Flick...


ROBERTS, Johannes (Dir.), “47 Metres Down”, Dimension Films/The Fyzz Facility/Dragon Root/Flexibon Films/Lantica Pictures/Tea Shop & Film Company, 2017.


With my passive sonar pinging, I encountered this DVD just the other day. I know it’s quite soon after my previous foray into deadly waters but I suspect that the surfeit of shark films that have been appearing lately might have something to do with a general public awareness campaign to do with surf and swimming safety and good boat-handling practice. Perhaps. It could also have something to do with idiotically self-important surf stars demanding shark culls on their favourite breaks, or perhaps it’s a sneaky campaign by those companies who make cans of shark-fin soup to demonstrate why we really do need a sharp increase in shark killing – or perhaps not. Regardless, these vested interests are probably being well-served by this kind of cinematic fare, which makes me kind of queasy about discussing it in any kind of positive light.

The best way to start I guess, is to rake over all the arguments once more in the interests of providing a counter-argument to hating on sharks. First and foremost: you are more likely to be killed by a cow, a bee or an automobile than a shark (in fact you’re more likely to get killed by a donkey, or a hippopotamus); second, you have to be in the water and acting stupidly in order for a shark to even notice you; third (and it galls me to even have to bring this up) sharks are not submersible torpedoes loaded with a pecker-stiffening Viagra equivalent – they’re fish. You’d probably earn more cred in the macho stakes by sucking down a jar of rollmops (from me certainly). There’s a particularly roast-y part of Hell for all those cretins who think that Chinese Medicine has any kind of potency and who support its planet-destroying trade…

So there you have it: arguments against everything that shark films prey upon. The real reason why these films are so popular comes back to those old tropes of Hollywood Morality, which mostly devolve to a sneaky thrill generated by watching young girls get killed by horrific monsters, fates predicated upon morally-dubious actions and activities set up in the early part of the movie. Too, in these days of computer-generated horrors, sharks are easy to model in a virtual environment: I suspect that there are readily-obtained pre-generated constructs out there that require only a little tweaking to suit any film-maker’s needs. Increasingly, we’re moving away from the practical effects of Spielberg’s “Jaws” and Renny Harlin’s “Deep Blue Sea”, and into a realm where shark flicks are almost 100% CGI, in terms of their finny antagonists. Finally, I’ve yet to see a shark movie where the location shooting isn’t some exotic beach locale or tropical tourist paradise – given that these stories are all about young people, there’s a definite ‘spring break’, or ‘schoolies’ mentality at work here, reflecting the target audience, but also manifesting as a tangible holiday perk for the film cast and crew. In short: cheap; nasty; easy; with benefits. Voila! I give you the shark film!

This movie contains all of the above, in a presentation which could have been assembled by rote. Two sisters, Lisa and Kate, go to Mexico for a vacation, and it is soon revealed that Lisa is escaping from the severance of her long-term relationship, a fact she kept secret from her younger sister. When Kate finds out, she sets about ramping-up the party tone of the holiday, insisting upon drinks, dancing and hooking up with the locals. Since ex-boyfriend Stephen claimed that he broke up with Lisa because she was “boring”, when the opportunity of cage-diving in shark-infested waters presents itself, Kate insists they both go, in order to demonstrate the fault in Stephen’s thinking.

So far, so obvious. When they get to the boat the next day, things get a little iffy: the vessel (named “Sea-esta”; yes, it’s that bad) is rusty and ancient and the crew leering and disorderly, with the exception of Captain Taylor (Matthew Modine, slumming again!). Lisa has further reservations, but Kate puts her foot down. Here is where Kate crosses the Hollywood Morality line for the final time: not only – by this point – has she insisted on making Lisa a party girl, encouraging her drinking, staying up late and kissing strange boys, now she pushes her into doing something that she absolutely does not want to do. Oh, and she lies to the Captain about the level of Lisa’s diving competency (zero). At this point we understand that Kate, along with the greasy, sarcastic first mate Javier, will not be coming home (no spoiler alerts required here).

Strangely, it’s at this point that the film takes off and shows some ingenuity. Rather than simply turning the last half of the film into a series of floating heads (a la “Open Water”) we instead learn the subtle and debilitating mysteries of SCUBA diving:

SCUBA diving is one of those activities that utterly bewilders me. The dangers and threats that you have to expose yourself to in order to take part in this sport boggle the mind. Not only are you putting yourself in harm’s way (low as it generally is) in terms of sharks, but you also mess with your body chemistry, exposing yourself to myriad life-destroying impairments along the way. The Bends is no joke: you can suffer aneurysms; burst blood vessels in your eyes resulting in permanent blindness; ruptured eardrums; you can split your hard palate and crack your teeth; create debilitating ruptures of your spinal cord; suffer paralysis; haemorrhage your lung tissue; and that’s if you don’t straight-up die. Nitrogen narcosis is a bitch.

Kate and Lisa enter the shark cage (swinging from its rusty chains, attached to a dodgy cable running through an even dodgier winch) and head into the depths. They become surrounded by sparkly fish and soon a big shark glides by creating a momentary thrill. Then the cage drops downwards a fraction: via a radio transmitter system, Captain Taylor says “nothing to worry about – just a little winch slippage” …then the cage plummets to the bottom of the sea. Didn’t see that coming! The girls end up on the ocean floor at 47 metres of depth – the radio transmitter conveniently cuts out at 35.

Now the scenario becomes a race for freedom while the air in their tanks slowly runs out. Initially Lisa panics and wastes a bunch of air by doing so; Kate is the first to venture out of the cage, in order to make contact with the ship by swimming up to 35 metres. Captain Taylor informs them that he’s sending the reprobate, Javier, down to them with a cable attached to a back-up winch and tells them to watch out for his tell-tale flashlight. They see the light, but Javier has roamed too far afield and has wandered into a benighted abyss far from where the cage is. Lisa – now with more air than Kate after shark encounters have upped her consumption – is forced to swim out to Javier and haul him back. Several close calls with sharks later, she meets up with him in time to see him horribly eaten. She returns with the cable, a few signal flares and a spear-gun (hooray!).

From here on in, every permutation of rescue from this unendurable situation takes place with varying degrees of failure and success - the new cable breaks; the spear-gun goes off accidentally (and doesn’t find a piscine target); fresh tanks are dropped and must be retrieved – and all the while the air pressure in the sisters’ reserves is ticking down. The end of the film provides an interesting wrinkle: before sending down the spare tanks, Captain Taylor warns them that breathing a second round of the oxygen mixture could cause hallucinations, dizziness and other neurological side-effects. He cautions them to watch each other closely for signs of this happening. This signals a distressing twist at the film’s conclusion but also paves the way for some truly outrageous stunts with the finny denizens of the deep, with Lisa going mano-a-mano with one of them as it leaps from the water to pluck her from the jaws of safety, amongst others.

Did I like this film? It starts slowly and the sound levels are truly weird at the beginning – I was raising and lowering the volume over and over trying to reach some kind of sweet spot before finding a level (about 20 minutes in) that catered for both the dialogue and the sound effects. Matthew Modine was a huge distraction and I wondered as to the thinking behind his inclusion. It’s been awhile since “Memphis Belle”, or “Cutthroat Island”, or “The Transporter 2”, or even that weird episode of “The West Wing” where he sleeps with Allison Janney at a school reunion, but he still stands out like a shark fin in a cast replete with no-names (Mandy Moore, pop starlet, included). I get it – even moderately well-known actors need to pay the rent occasionally, but this was really slumming it!

The sharks are all CGI spectres and they glide in an out of the dark on cue. There are some nifty shots of them through the surface of the water from the boat’s deck but underwater they seemed a bit lacklustre. There’s a ridiculous moment during a rescue attempt when the signal flare goes dark and, when the girls light the next one, it’s only to find themselves surrounded by gaping maws. Do the sharks carry on with these launched attacks despite the sudden illumination? No: like a pack of underwater Stooges suddenly caught in the act, they flee into the dark – “Nyuck! Nyuck! Nyuck! Whoops! Woo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo…!” Like a shark going into a full-on bite frenzy, I rolled my eyes…

I enjoyed the extra layer of dramatics that the SCUBA process brought to the table in terms of creating complexity in the narrative – it was far and away better than just watching heads floating through the waves and listening to endless bitching before the inevitable. This film also had its moments of “it’s all your fault we’re in this mess!” recriminations, but thankfully, it was low-key. It’s not “The Shallows”; it’s not even “Jaws”; however, “Open Water” 1, 2 or 3, it certainly isn’t either, and that gives it three Tentacled Horrors from me.

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