“This is your captain speaking … Prepare for impact.”
It’s been 50 years since Steven Spielberg made his bones on a hot summer movie called Jaws. Based on a Peter Benchley bestseller, the film made millions of people all over the world think twice before dipping their toes into the wild environment of their local beach. We all think about it. We go anyway, but Spielberg made us think about it for the rest of our lives. The trend spawned a flurry of 1970’s nature-attacks films from bees to grizzly bears. When cable came about, we got Shark Week every year for decades. There’s just something about that 1975 film that continues to impact our entertainment. Now we have the “shark” movie as a genre, and for all of those 50 years everyone has been chasing that one movie’s atmosphere and excitement. It should be rather easy when you think about it. Spielberg bit off more than he could chew by taking on the film. He was a young, rather inexperienced director, and he soon discovered shooting out in the water is one of Dante’s layers of Hell. They created a large lifelike mechanical shark they called Bruce. And as realistic as Bruce looked, he kept breaking down, so that we ended up seeing much less of him than was planned. That’s what filmmakers now call a fortunate disaster. Now filmmakers can create anything we can imagine. Someone has got to be able to deliver goods that Spielberg couldn’t even dream of delivering. But so far no one has. Accomplished director Renny Harlin can be called many things. Inexperienced isn’t one of them. Could he be the one to finally break through that saltwater wall? It’s time to find out with the Blu-ray release of Deep Water, out from Magenta Studios this week.
Deep Water starts out like pretty much every Irwin Allen disaster film I’ve ever seen. We’re at an airline terminal, and we get introduced to several of the characters about to board the plane. This is an important part of the formula, because these are the folks who are going to survive to the next level. No spoilers here. It’s disaster movies 101. We have a rather sarcastic grandmother going to Shanghai to meet her newborn grandchild. That’s Becky (Fitzpatrick). We have the loudmouthed idiot who demands his every wish is serviced, and yesterday. That’s Dan (Sampson). His carelessness is going to be a big plot point in the movie. We have the new family. Two parents each bringing their own child. Dad’s daughter is Cora (Wright), and she’s bummed that she has to be in charge of looking out for her new brother … eh … stepbrother, Finn (Tamati). Finn has a little “pet” tracker so Cora can keep tabs on him. Of course, experienced moviegoers like us know that there’s a good reason they are showing us how this tracker system works. So pay attention, there will be a quiz later. There’s the pilot who is about to retire, and that’s Sir Ben Kingsley as Captain Rich. His first officer is a guy who by now should have been a captain, as one of the children reminds him as he’s boarding the plane. He’s Ben, played by Aaron Eckhart. More about him later. You have the athlete who his too tough for his britches in Hutch (Johnson), and the teammates who are in love, but it’s against the rules. With our program card filled out, it’s time to take to those unfriendly skies. So far we have the makings for Airport 26.
When the flight is out in the middle of the Pacific Ocean miles from nowhere, trouble strikes. A-hole Dan wasn’t paying attention when they asked him those annoying questions about batteries or hazardous materials in his luggage. Lesson number one. Pay attention or this could happen to you. The device catches fire and explodes in the cargo hold. Holes open up in the plane, and it’s that first casting call cut, and it’s a brutal one. We have to go from 257 characters down to a more manageable 30 or so. And most of them are going to be red shirts. The landing in the ocean manages to keep those 30 alive, but now there are pieces of a jet airliner scattered over a couple of hundred yards of ocean. This was the best element of the film. It helps set this one apart from other shark movies. We have people in various isolated parts of the broken plane, each with a handful of survivors and each with their own unique circumstances to continue to survive. Of course that second casting call cut has to come, and we lose a few more. This is the chance for Ben to prove he has what it takes to find a way to save as many of these folks as he can. It’s not a great batting average, but he does step up to the plate. Unfortunately for that plan, there are hungry, obviously CGI sharks that need feeding.
Here’s lesson 2. If you are ever getting ready to board a plane and Aaron Eckhart gets on board, run, don’t walk, to the plane’s exit and take a later flight. You see, this is the second time he was part of a plane crew who had to ditch in the water. Eckhart played a member of the flight crew in Clint Eastwood’s excellent film Sully, where a brave captain has to land his plane in … you guessed it … the water. So Eckhart is not flying in any plane I’m getting on.
I will say this one is a cut above most of the plethora of shark films I’ve seen over the years. The separated groups gives us some diversity in situations that I found rather refreshing. The ocean cinematography is also really great. But the CG sharks are just too silly and animated to be at all scary. I don’t know how much that CG work cost Renny, but if I were him I’d be asking for my money back. Hopefully the warranty didn’t expire. Fifty years ago Spielberg scared us more with a mechanical shark that didn’t work half the time. I’ve seen some CG sharks that were actually pretty good, but that’s not the case here. It’s a well-made film in almost every other aspect, but Renny would have been better served forgetting the sharks, at least as his main event, and making it more about the airliner disaster. And even though he’s sticking way too close to formula here, a lot of that movie still works. So it’s a pretty cool disaster film, but a really bad shark film. And I’m a Renny fan. I loved Die Hard 2, and Deep Blue Sea was an above average shark movie with some of the same issues. You think he might have learned something in a couple of decades and given us better sharks. I don’t know what went wrong, but Renny is capable, and has already delivered better than this. So I put the blame completely on his head. Lesson 3. Do better. “It’s your fault.”
