261 Days of Horror, Day 27: Deep Blue Sea
Feb. 6th, 2007 07:06 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
yendiDeep Blue Sea. 1999. Directed by Renny Harlin. Written by Donna and Wayne Powers and Duncan Kennedy. Distributed by Warner Brothers.
Can one scene make a movie?
Deep Blue Sea is, on balance, a surprisingly cute little film, better than most of the post-Jaws shark films*. It breaks any number of "rules" from the opening moments, and has some decent suspense throughout.
But it's one scene right in the middle that everyone remembers.
Let's start at the beginning, though. A group of college students are partying on a boat, not realizing that boats -- whether in Jason Takes Manhattan, Deep Rising, or Cape Fear -- are bad places to be in movies. We get the usual chatter, and a sense of foreboding brought about by the score and by one of the students saying stuff like, "did you feel something?" Just as the score tells us that the students are dead meat, we see the researchers swoop in and stop a shark that got away from them from attacking these kids. It's a clever little opener that tells the audience from the get-go that Deep Blue Sea isn't trying to be Jaws.
We now get our twenty minutes of exposition and character development. I'll note the important stuff:
On an offshore research facility, Samuel L. Jackson is funding experiments designed to cure Alzheimer's. These experiments are conducted by Saffron Burrows, based on the theory that sharks, when faced with a fashion model, will spontaneously generate breakthrough cures. When this theory fails, they fall back on Saffron making the sharks smarter (which, if not the dumbest thing ever done on the big screen, has to be in the top ten). There's a lot of mumbo jumbo here, but the theory is basically that since sharks don't get Alzheimer's, experimenting with their brains can lead to a cure. Or something. Go science!
Also on board is future Punisher Thomas Jane, playing a guy named Carter Blake (thus giving us two more Marvel names***). He's playing an ex-con who broods and swims with sharks, because as an ex-con, he's clearly never been trained in shark behavior, and assumes they're just like dolphins and that swimming with them and grabbing their fins is a smart thing to do. Being a lucky fool, he naturally survives the movie.
Joining those three is LL Cool J as The Black Man Who Survives Back-to-Back Horror Flicks****. He plays the facility's cook, a man named Preacher (we never meet the facility's chaplain, but I'm betting he's named Chef). He has a foul-mouthed parrot, because that's how preacher chefs roll.
We meet other scientists, but they're just there to die, so let's not spend too much time worrying about them,
The other crucial pieces of exposition that we get are A) the facility will be run by a skeleton crew this weekend; B) there are three mutated sharks, two from the first generation, and one from the second; C) Samuel Jackson's character (who is president of a pharmaceutical company) is known for surviving a horrible avalanche; D) Saffron Burrows has been conducting illegal experiments; and E) the Sharks have been acting all uppity, attacking Jane's shark cage, resisting tranq darts, and wearing gang colors*****. The uppity behavior also includes swimming backwards, something that sharks can't do based on their physiological structure, not the size of their brains.
Let's cut to the fun stuff. A scientist, played by Stellan "Bootstrap Bill" Skarsgard, lights a cigarette next to what he assumes is a tranquilized shark. The shark, thinking he's actually working on a cancer cure and not Alzheimer's, is horribly offended, and wakes up enough to bite the guy's arm off. The rest of the crew responds calmly and without saying anything painfully obvious, assuming that you don't think that "he's hemorrhaging" is the most obvious thing that could ever be said about a man whose arm has just been bitten off.
Naturally, the bleeding man is loaded onto a helicopter, where he can be airlifted to safety. A horrible storm, however, causes the winch to fail, and our poor scientist ends up below the waves, dragged right through the area in which the super sharks are residing. They grab the floating snack, and manage to drag the entire helicopter down beneath the waves, all the way to Cowtown and into the side of the facility, destroying a good chunk of the above-water sections. The sharks manage to use the body of the dead scientist to crack open the underwater walls (take that, physics!), and we get massive flooding.
Chaos ensues. Preacher's parrot is eaten by one of the first generation sharks, but Preacher hides out inside the top oven in the kitchen, which is strong enough to withstand a shark attack. When the shark, taking advantage of the rising floodwaters, finally breaks into the oven's lower half, Preacher escapes through the top, leaving an exploding gas oven trap behind him, just like they teach in Boy Scouts. One shark down, two to go.
And now we come to The Scene. With the survivors gathered in one of the few flood-free areas, Sam Jackson gives a rousing speech about surviving in the wilderness, with all the usual fanfare. And right in the middle of his sentence, as he's shouting about how they'll seal off the pool in the lab they're in, a shark grabs him and swallows him up! No musical cues, no pausees in his speech, just a shark gobbling up poor Sam. Better yet, however, is that his rousing speech was also making it abundantly clear that he survived in the wilderness by committing acts of cannibalism! Just a perfect scene, and the highlight of the movie.
Around this time, we get the revelation that the sharks have gotten too smart (duh!), as Burrows crossed the line in her experiments. We get a few more set pieces (make the characters swim through danger, etc), and finally, the survivors climb to safety in a set piece that's designed specifically to kill Jacqueline McKenzie's character, who obliges. Up near the surface, Saffron ends up alone in a room with Carter (because there's always time for sexual tension), and later with the other first generation shark. She manages to electrocute the latter, but the heroes realize that if the third shark (the female one) manages to break through the protective fence surrounding the facility, it will have little super-smart shark babies, and soon the sharks will rise up from the ocean and take over the world, killing people by pretending to deliver candygrams. Because, naturally, when you experiment on sharks and make them super-smart, you'd never imagine, say, sterilizing them. Right?
They can't let this happen, so when they make it to the surface and see the shark pounding its way out, they come up with a cunning plan: blow it up! Alas, the shark is too busy trying to bust out, so they have to distract it by doing really stupid things, like letting Saffron get eaten, and letting Carter get shot with a harpoon and attached to the shark by Preacher. Fortunately, they also manage to blow the shark to bits, and if that means losing Saffron, at least the world has been saved.
Deep Blue Sea is a thoroughly dumb movie. It's also thoroughly fun, especially when watched with a group. The inconsistent Renny Harlin does a nice job with the material, keeping a sense of menace throughout, and making it perfectly clear that traditional shark movie expectations can be thrown out the window. He throws in plenty of good visual gags and references to the Jaws series, as well. The equally inconsistent writing team of Donna and Wayne Powers (the couple behind both The Italian Job remake and Valentine) do a good job with the script, tossing in some nice ideas in lieu of well-developed characters and good science. The real stars behind the scenes are the folks behind the animatronic sharks, who do a phenomenal job, especially important in light of how much screentime they get. The CGI is less impressive, but the animatronics are more important in this film, anyway. Throw in an okay cast (the only talented folks, Jackson and J, do more scenery chewing than acting), and the movie's a perfectly fun way to kill an afternoon.
*Yes, even better than Shark Attack 3: Megalodon**.
**And yes, I know that "Megalodon" is a real scientific term. But it's still one of the dumber names for a movie in recent memory.
***Night Nurse and Thor, during the Silver Age. Don't knock Night Nurse.
****His previous film was Halloween: H20, in case you were interested.
*****Okay. Only two out of three of those are true.
Can one scene make a movie?
Deep Blue Sea is, on balance, a surprisingly cute little film, better than most of the post-Jaws shark films*. It breaks any number of "rules" from the opening moments, and has some decent suspense throughout.
But it's one scene right in the middle that everyone remembers.
Let's start at the beginning, though. A group of college students are partying on a boat, not realizing that boats -- whether in Jason Takes Manhattan, Deep Rising, or Cape Fear -- are bad places to be in movies. We get the usual chatter, and a sense of foreboding brought about by the score and by one of the students saying stuff like, "did you feel something?" Just as the score tells us that the students are dead meat, we see the researchers swoop in and stop a shark that got away from them from attacking these kids. It's a clever little opener that tells the audience from the get-go that Deep Blue Sea isn't trying to be Jaws.
We now get our twenty minutes of exposition and character development. I'll note the important stuff:
On an offshore research facility, Samuel L. Jackson is funding experiments designed to cure Alzheimer's. These experiments are conducted by Saffron Burrows, based on the theory that sharks, when faced with a fashion model, will spontaneously generate breakthrough cures. When this theory fails, they fall back on Saffron making the sharks smarter (which, if not the dumbest thing ever done on the big screen, has to be in the top ten). There's a lot of mumbo jumbo here, but the theory is basically that since sharks don't get Alzheimer's, experimenting with their brains can lead to a cure. Or something. Go science!
Also on board is future Punisher Thomas Jane, playing a guy named Carter Blake (thus giving us two more Marvel names***). He's playing an ex-con who broods and swims with sharks, because as an ex-con, he's clearly never been trained in shark behavior, and assumes they're just like dolphins and that swimming with them and grabbing their fins is a smart thing to do. Being a lucky fool, he naturally survives the movie.
Joining those three is LL Cool J as The Black Man Who Survives Back-to-Back Horror Flicks****. He plays the facility's cook, a man named Preacher (we never meet the facility's chaplain, but I'm betting he's named Chef). He has a foul-mouthed parrot, because that's how preacher chefs roll.
We meet other scientists, but they're just there to die, so let's not spend too much time worrying about them,
The other crucial pieces of exposition that we get are A) the facility will be run by a skeleton crew this weekend; B) there are three mutated sharks, two from the first generation, and one from the second; C) Samuel Jackson's character (who is president of a pharmaceutical company) is known for surviving a horrible avalanche; D) Saffron Burrows has been conducting illegal experiments; and E) the Sharks have been acting all uppity, attacking Jane's shark cage, resisting tranq darts, and wearing gang colors*****. The uppity behavior also includes swimming backwards, something that sharks can't do based on their physiological structure, not the size of their brains.
Let's cut to the fun stuff. A scientist, played by Stellan "Bootstrap Bill" Skarsgard, lights a cigarette next to what he assumes is a tranquilized shark. The shark, thinking he's actually working on a cancer cure and not Alzheimer's, is horribly offended, and wakes up enough to bite the guy's arm off. The rest of the crew responds calmly and without saying anything painfully obvious, assuming that you don't think that "he's hemorrhaging" is the most obvious thing that could ever be said about a man whose arm has just been bitten off.
Naturally, the bleeding man is loaded onto a helicopter, where he can be airlifted to safety. A horrible storm, however, causes the winch to fail, and our poor scientist ends up below the waves, dragged right through the area in which the super sharks are residing. They grab the floating snack, and manage to drag the entire helicopter down beneath the waves, all the way to Cowtown and into the side of the facility, destroying a good chunk of the above-water sections. The sharks manage to use the body of the dead scientist to crack open the underwater walls (take that, physics!), and we get massive flooding.
Chaos ensues. Preacher's parrot is eaten by one of the first generation sharks, but Preacher hides out inside the top oven in the kitchen, which is strong enough to withstand a shark attack. When the shark, taking advantage of the rising floodwaters, finally breaks into the oven's lower half, Preacher escapes through the top, leaving an exploding gas oven trap behind him, just like they teach in Boy Scouts. One shark down, two to go.
And now we come to The Scene. With the survivors gathered in one of the few flood-free areas, Sam Jackson gives a rousing speech about surviving in the wilderness, with all the usual fanfare. And right in the middle of his sentence, as he's shouting about how they'll seal off the pool in the lab they're in, a shark grabs him and swallows him up! No musical cues, no pausees in his speech, just a shark gobbling up poor Sam. Better yet, however, is that his rousing speech was also making it abundantly clear that he survived in the wilderness by committing acts of cannibalism! Just a perfect scene, and the highlight of the movie.
Around this time, we get the revelation that the sharks have gotten too smart (duh!), as Burrows crossed the line in her experiments. We get a few more set pieces (make the characters swim through danger, etc), and finally, the survivors climb to safety in a set piece that's designed specifically to kill Jacqueline McKenzie's character, who obliges. Up near the surface, Saffron ends up alone in a room with Carter (because there's always time for sexual tension), and later with the other first generation shark. She manages to electrocute the latter, but the heroes realize that if the third shark (the female one) manages to break through the protective fence surrounding the facility, it will have little super-smart shark babies, and soon the sharks will rise up from the ocean and take over the world, killing people by pretending to deliver candygrams. Because, naturally, when you experiment on sharks and make them super-smart, you'd never imagine, say, sterilizing them. Right?
They can't let this happen, so when they make it to the surface and see the shark pounding its way out, they come up with a cunning plan: blow it up! Alas, the shark is too busy trying to bust out, so they have to distract it by doing really stupid things, like letting Saffron get eaten, and letting Carter get shot with a harpoon and attached to the shark by Preacher. Fortunately, they also manage to blow the shark to bits, and if that means losing Saffron, at least the world has been saved.
Deep Blue Sea is a thoroughly dumb movie. It's also thoroughly fun, especially when watched with a group. The inconsistent Renny Harlin does a nice job with the material, keeping a sense of menace throughout, and making it perfectly clear that traditional shark movie expectations can be thrown out the window. He throws in plenty of good visual gags and references to the Jaws series, as well. The equally inconsistent writing team of Donna and Wayne Powers (the couple behind both The Italian Job remake and Valentine) do a good job with the script, tossing in some nice ideas in lieu of well-developed characters and good science. The real stars behind the scenes are the folks behind the animatronic sharks, who do a phenomenal job, especially important in light of how much screentime they get. The CGI is less impressive, but the animatronics are more important in this film, anyway. Throw in an okay cast (the only talented folks, Jackson and J, do more scenery chewing than acting), and the movie's a perfectly fun way to kill an afternoon.
*Yes, even better than Shark Attack 3: Megalodon**.
**And yes, I know that "Megalodon" is a real scientific term. But it's still one of the dumber names for a movie in recent memory.
***Night Nurse and Thor, during the Silver Age. Don't knock Night Nurse.
****His previous film was Halloween: H20, in case you were interested.
*****Okay. Only two out of three of those are true.