The Meg (2018)
Directed by Jon Turteltaub
A deep sea submersible pilot revisits his past fears in the Mariana Trench, and accidentally unleashes the seventy foot ancestor of the Great White Shark believed to be extinct.
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62 films that influenced The Meg
What critics say influenced The Meg
Say what you will about director Renny Harlin, but he at least kept his dopey shark film, Deep Blue Sea, moving at mach speed.
You assume it will either try to replicate the high-seas terror of Jaws, the Grand Guignol gore of the 2010 Piranha remake or the self-aware giddiness of this legendary scene from Deep Blue Sea ; instead, the movie just borrows elements and steals shots from a host of waterlogged horror-adventure flicks without bothering to channel what makes those movies a blast.
Ahí están los guiños al clásico de Steven Spielberg, Tiburón (Jaws, 1975), o a Alerta en lo profundo (Deep Blue Sea, 1999) calcados con poca inspiración, a diferencia de, por ejemplo, lo hecho por Jaume Collet-Serra (El pasajero, Desconocido) en Miedo profundo (The Shallows, 2016) donde, si bien, no se transformaba lo previamente establecido o se habrían nuevas veredas de exploración, sí se presentaba la historia como un gran juego visual de supervivencia, con colores saturados y situaciones ridículas dignas del mejor serie b.
The shark movie to which this owes the biggest debt, right down to certain character types and the odd death scene, is Renny Harlin’s schlockbuster Deep Blue Sea .
Scripts for a film adaptation of Steve Alten’s 1997 novel Meg: A Novel of Deep Terror have been flopping between studios since before the smart-shark hit Deep Blue Sea rose up in 1999 and stole Meg ‘s thunder.
There are plenty of big set pieces, which either rip off or pay homage to everything from Jaws to Piranha 3D to Deep Blue Sea , depending on your view.
The marketing behind The Meg pitches its shark as Jaws times 50, with trailers showcasing CGI eye candy of a massive man-eater swimming just below hundreds of unaware swimmers.
Something of a mix between the obvious Jaws influence and the more abstract Armageddon elements, The Meg delivers as many scares as a PG-13 film can handle these days.
As for Jaume Collet-Serra’s recent shark thriller The Shallows (2016) or the ne plus ultra of the genre, Jaws (1975), considered an overbudget debacle during its shoot, they are but small fry next to The Meg, both in budget and in featured fish—Steven Spielberg’s Great White, at an estimated 25 feet, would be chum for the mighty Meg.
Stripped of the script's distractions and allowed to go at full throttle for at least the last 60 minutes, The Meg – even with all its Jaws, Orca and Jurassic Park steals intact – could still have been a gloriously unhinged good time.
It’s hard to say how much of this comes from the popularity of “Shark Week” or the deliberately absurd “Sharknado” series — of course it all traces back to “Jaws” — but this year’s offering wants to blend the more serious horror vibe of the last two summer films with the campiness of the Sci-Fi Channel schlock-fest.
One of the smarter things The Meg does is rip off Jaws with the exactness of a forger, cribbing a great shot here and there, but also mirroring the entire climax of the 1975 classic in miniature.
As for Jaume Collet-Serra’s recent shark thriller The Shallows (2016) or the ne plus ultra of the genre, Jaws (1975), considered an overbudget debacle during its shoot, they are but small fry next to The Meg, both in budget and in featured fish—Steven Spielberg’s Great White, at an estimated 25 feet, would be chum for the mighty Meg.
Nor, in fact, does it even make it to the level of the 2016 Blake Lively effort, The Shallows .
The blandness begins with the film’s washed-out color palette, which denies us the expressionistic beauty that Jaume Collet-Serra cultivated in The Shallows (fuck, sorry, I know that’s another shark movie) and, more generally, the red-blooded pleasure that should go with a story about a monster eating people who are dumb enough to swim or experiment scientifically in its general vicinity.
Director Jon Turteltaub (“National Treasure”) has all the ingredients for a late splash of summer fun, although the film never embraces the wink and nod charm of past shark flicks (Blake Lively faced tougher odds in “The Shallows”) and can't seem to overcome a script that's too dull, even by the low standards this CGI-laden genre tends to bark up.
Ahí están los guiños al clásico de Steven Spielberg, Tiburón (Jaws, 1975), o a Alerta en lo profundo (Deep Blue Sea, 1999) calcados con poca inspiración, a diferencia de, por ejemplo, lo hecho por Jaume Collet-Serra (El pasajero, Desconocido) en Miedo profundo (The Shallows, 2016) donde, si bien, no se transformaba lo previamente establecido o se habrían nuevas veredas de exploración, sí se presentaba la historia como un gran juego visual de supervivencia, con colores saturados y situaciones ridículas dignas del mejor serie b.
So many occasions arise for uncommon adventure, but the script continues to return to run-of-the-mill trivialities and encounters, copying notions from other underwater thrillers like “The Abyss” and “Deep Blue Sea.”
Anyone picking apart the questionable science, hammy romantic subplot, or the myriad disaster movie tropes in an attempt to find a film to rival Jaws , or The Abyss, has missed the point.
It begins like James Cameron’s The Abyss but ends in the kind of toothless high campery found in last year’s Baywatch .
Now, I'll admit, everything I know about deep sea exploration I learned from watching The Abyss, so I was under the impression that along with the dangers of underwater aliens, diving at those depths can be treacherous, with the need for slow decompression lest you risk the bends, or worse.
Otherwise, it's Jaws meets The Abyss in this long-awaited (by some) adaptation of Steve Alten's 1997 novel, simply called Meg (there have been six sequels), centered on a rescue attempt on a research submersible stuck at 11,000 meters down, the deepest point in the Pacific.
You can see the heavy influence of other sci-fi aquatic films, specifically James Cameron’s The Abyss; prior to that film, Cameron reportedly had to commission clear full-face diving masks so you could see the actors in the water.
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Alexandre Aja’s brilliant B-movie excursion “Piranha 3D” transformed the horror movie premise of the original into a live action comic book that flaunted outrageous genre tropes like a firecracker; Turteltaub never gains such confidence in the material to let it go all-out bonkers.
Essentially a PG-13 version of Alexandre Aja’s Piranha 3D with fewer jokes and even less of a point, The Meg is a faceless, lifeless, workmanlike, unimaginative, lowest common denominator-courting, movie-like substance.
Imagine a trashy empty-calories combo of Sharknado and the gore-and-nudity-heavy Piranha 3D—two horror movies loaded with lovable dumbness.
There are plenty of big set pieces, which either rip off or pay homage to everything from Jaws to Piranha 3D to Deep Blue Sea , depending on your view.
I don’t need Piranha 3D -type levels of brutality (though, let’s be honest, that would’ve been welcome) but when you come to see a giant shark make lunch out of a slew of cardboard cut-out characters, I don’t want to have their supposed personalities “explored” instead.
The answer arrived in the film’s final act, a portion of which is set on a crowded beach in China’s Sanya Bay that instantly nods to both the fictional Jaws town of Amity, MA and Lake Victoria, home of Alexandre Aja’s Piranha 3D.
Stripped of the script's distractions and allowed to go at full throttle for at least the last 60 minutes, The Meg – even with all its Jaws, Orca and Jurassic Park steals intact – could still have been a gloriously unhinged good time.
There are moments where The Meg knowingly winks to Jaws – hell, it even tries to be a bit Jurassic Park, too.
The new Jason Statham water adventure "The Meg" is a cross between "Jaws," "Jurassic Park" and "Sharknado."
“ The Meg ” had a simple but kind of brilliant concept: mix “Jaws” with “Jurassic Park” and throw in hunky Jason Statham.
As marketed, The Meg looks like a breezy, campy monster movie that supersizes Jaws with an infusion of Jurassic Park .
Based on the book Meg: A Novel Of Deep Terror by Steve Alten which came out in 1997, just four years after Jurassic Park redefined the blockbuster movie, The Meg similarly imagines what would happen if a prehistoric creature thought to be extinct, resurfaced because of mankind’s meddling and posed a serious threat to the modern world.
And let’s not even bother comparing it to Jaws (1975), although serious shark movie aficionados will recognize a major plot point that has been lifted from Jaws 3-D (1983).
It’s not as howlingly awful as Jaws 3-D or Sharknado 3: Oh Hell No! but for the $150 million USD and however many millions of yuan Warner Brothers’ Chinese cohorts-cum-financiers Gravity Pictures threw into this summer action flick, it should by all rights be more flat-out fun.
You’ll get Finding Nemo and Shark Tale references, DJ’s (Page Kennedy) “Maybe let’s not hunt the massive Megalodon?”
Taken purely for what it is, there’s plenty to enjoy about The Meg , from the sight of Statham in the aforementioned straw hat, to some well-judged jump scares based off humans being flung into the water, a sweet Finding Nemo reference, and the fact it does take quite a bit of effort to actually kill the blasted thing.
Did I mention that the other two films were Finding Nemo and Shark Tale?
Save for a genuinely amusing send off to Finding Nemo, a tiny dog named Pippin that miraculously survives (surely honoring the memory of Jaws’ fetch-loving pooch Pippet), and Suyin’s adorable young daughter Meiying (Shuya Sophia Cai, the reason you won’t walk out of the The Meg halfway through), there isn’t much here that dares to be memorable.
It's neat to see him in the water, winking (intentionally or not) at his history as a diver, and it's downright delightful to hear him quoting Finding Nemo .
Not so derivative of “Jaws” as of its increasingly disappointing sequels, “The Meg” denies its titular beast much of the perspective and the audience much of the suspense of the unseen that made Bruce the shark so terrifying in the summer of 1975, instead relying on quick initial glimpses of what would turn out to be terrible CGI of a shark that was scarier and more sinister in “Finding Nemo.”
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Instead, The Meg trails lazily in its wake, constantly reminding you — just as Skyscraper did with The Towering Inferno and Die Hard — that there are better films of its ilk that you could be watching instead.
On the subject of John McClane, after the screening someone mentioned to me that The Meg “is like Die Hard in the water.”
If shark attacks appeal, hit the video store or your favorite streaming services and check out the wonderfully bugnuts (and as legend has it, epically trashed) Richard Harris in 1977’s Orca or the more somber but genuinely harrowing Open Water.