Review: "The Meg"

TURTELTAUB, Jon (Dir.), “The Meg”, Warner Bros. Pictures/Gravity Pictures, 2018.

I’m not a conspiracy nut, but there’s a part of me that thinks all of these shark films are part of a movement to discredit sharks and make them seem more villainous than they are (they aren’t) in order to prop up sales of bogus Chinese medicinal cures. Sharks universally get the rough end of the pineapple simply because nature’s take on an efficient killing machine doesn’t come with big puppy eyes and snugly fur. That doesn’t alter the fact that since 2006, more people in Australia have been killed by horses than they have by sharks, and the shark stats don’t even get out of the single digits. Despite this, stupid people who think that they suddenly develop a shield of immunity when they pop on their budgie-smugglers and jump into the surf, cry out in their fear for shark culls, drift nets and other ridiculous tactics that cost more lives (human and otherwise), time and effort than simply leaving. The Damned. Fish. ALONE!

(*Ahem!*)

In this flick, the creators sought to find a way to make the sharks bigger and meaner than ever before. In doing so, they turned to prehistory and decided to revive the biggest, baddest shark of all time, the Megalodon, or “Meg” as they have contracted it (and taken from the book series of the same name). It’s at this point that they start to come undone: in order to make us believe in this creature, they have to contrive a means whereby it could have survived the millennia without our ever being aware of it. Their rationale is that the beastie has been living far below what we’ve perceived as the bottom of the deepest undersea trench on the planet, held down there by a layer of freezing-cold water which prevents it rising to the surface. The realm below this layer, or “thermocline”, has been visually obscured for us by a drifting cloud of silt caught in its chilly embrace. Now, I’m not fully conversant in the ways that sonar works but I’m pretty certain that a cloud of silt doesn’t block its functioning; so the initial premise of this movie that no-one is even sure that there is a lower depth to the seabed than previously thought is a dubious one from the get-go.

Anyway, once we’ve floated this concept of a ‘deeper dark’, our heroes blithely wander down into it in their submersibles, only to be attacked first, by a giant squid, and later, by the Meg itself. “Oh no!” they cry, “who would have thought that there would be consequences to our unthinking hubris?” Anyway, we soon have stranded submersibles on the (actual) seafloor more than 11,000 metres below the surface and the support team in the seabase up above decides to call in an expert to save them.

That person turns out to be Jason Statham who plays the hard-bitten diving expert Jonas (see what they did there?), now hard-drinking in obscurity in Thailand. In the pre-credit sequence we see that he once tried to save some submariners in a stranded vessel way down in the trench but was forced to abandon half his team and some of the victims in order to flee the Meg’s assault. Since no-one else survived who saw the bite which the shark inflicted on the sub, Jonas is considered to have contracted some kind of depth-inflicted delusion and to have recklessly abandoned the rescue causing multiple deaths. Note well that, in this part of the flick, the nature of deep-sea diving effects upon the human corpus is played for all it’s worth; they abandon it pretty quickly hereafter.

Jonas decides not to become involved, but after learning that his ex-wife is trapped down in the dark, he decides to come on board. Now, movies bend the truth an awful lot and are a mine of disinformation (not only about the savagery and vindictiveness of sharks) but here we steer a course close to being recklessly loose with the truth. If you’ve ever gone SCUBA diving, you’ll be aware that you’re not supposed to drink alcohol for a certain time beforehand; it alters your blood chemistry and can make you susceptible to various forms of pressure-related incapacity. Nevertheless, our hero goes from hard-drinking in Thailand to jumping aboard a deep-sea submersible within a couple of hours. We’re asked to believe that he’s crazy because he once saw a big shark; I’m more prepared to call him crazy for participating at all in the rescue.

From here on in the gloves are off: pressure has no place in the Meg’s universe. Giant sharks can rocket up to the surface from 11,000 metres without exploding upon breaching the meniscus and people can do likewise. Ladies and gentlemen: physics has left the building.

All this being said, the rest of this flick is simply an action blockbuster, the plotting of which has nothing at all to add to the body of lore that already exists out there. It charts a course from “Jaws”, to “Deep Blue Sea”, through to “The Shallows”, without drawing breath, nimbly sidestepping everything we learned from “The Abyss”. The only difference is that all those movies said something interesting; this one does not.

What this film does bring to the mix is an interesting non-Eurocentric flavour. We begin our adventure in the China Sea, bounce around in Thailand for awhile, and then wash up on a Chinese beach resort. Along the way there are references to Taiwan, Japan, even Australia, in order to absolutely demonstrate that we aren’t in the Americas at all. The pool of non-Asian actors is quite small and this is a refreshing change. Obviously, this is because a huge whack of the funding for this movie came from Chinese sources, showing the influence which Beijing is able to exercise over international popular culture nowadays. In an affront to my conspiracy thinking ways, the Chinese characters in this story actually deplore the brutal destruction of sharks for their fins and pseudo-medical applications, so I was genuinely pleased by that inclusion.

Not that, let me be clear, there are any Oscars about to be handed out for the thespians in this vehicle. Jason Statham began his career as a likeable enough leading-man-slash-action-dude but after wallowing in the mire of “The Expendables” for far too long, has lost all intention of bringing nuance to his roles. He pouts; he sulks; he gets his shirt off and then looks around for the girl he’s gonna get. It’s all by the numbers without a trace of subtlety but then, how subtle do you need to be to punch a shark the size of a jumbo jet? There is absolutely no chemistry between him and the heroine, Li Bingbing, and the assumption that they’ll get together after the credits roll lies entirely in all the knowing winks and head nods of the other actors around them.

In the meantime, there’s a conniving billionaire businessman, a self-sacrificing doctor, several pairs of lifelong buddies who don’t survive, a black guy who doesn’t get eaten (following “Deep Blue Sea’s” innovation here), several cute girls to throw in harm’s way and an adorable eight-year-old to provide contrast with the monster: all by-the-numbers action movie plotting, with some agreeable visuals and the inevitable girls in bikinis. At least the dog survives.

Two-and-a-half Tentacled Horrors.