I put off watching this movie for a long time because I have a love-hate relationship with sharks. This is not based on personal, physical experience with actual sharks but is instead based on a lifelong love affair with the ocean. I love to swim in the sea. I have swum and played in the ocean since before I can remember. I have swum during the day and at night, in calm and storm, in waves that have towered twice my own considerable height above me and smooth water stretching sixty or more feet below me, in clear blue water and murky greens and greys, in water that seemed barely cooler than my own skin and water cold enough to turn my legs blue. Although scuba diving is contraindicated for me (for health reasons I'll be glad to explain later, if folks wish), I do snorkel, and I have played around fish as big as my arm.
I do not fear the ocean.
The shark, however, particularly the Great White, with its predilection toward attacking surface-swimming seal-like things from sixty feet down in murky water, scares me senseless. I have this horrifying fear of being grabbed by something beneath the waves and pulled down to my death. It's the suspense more than anything else, really. I mean, sure, I'd hate to have the actual tragedy played out, but the anticipation of the attack, that horror generated by a powerful imagination, is greater to me now than any attack could ever be. And yet....
The shark holds an almost totemic place in my psyche. The ferocity, the drive, the pure skill with which it hunts its prey, its amazing social structure which rivals that of wolves in its complexity, its incredible, sleek form so well adapted to its environment-- it is at once bogey-man and exquisitely beautiful hunter, both psychotic murderer and perfect warrior-king. It is Strength and Courage and the Chariot all rolled into one.
And so it is that the shark compels and repels me, fascinates me and revolts me.
Why then, you might ask, would I rent a movie devoted to the use of the shark as horror device, as malign, malicious intelligent monster? Why, indeed.
Perhaps because I knew, deep down inside, that The Deep Blue Sea would not be that scary. Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of good old-fashioned jump-out-of-your-skin frights. It's just that the majority of these are telegraphed from a mile away, so that by the time the "boo" arrives, I'd already been through the shock and past it.
The movie works very hard to establish that these are particularly clever, super-intelligent sharks, both bigger and smarter than their paltry non-enhanced brethren on whom they evidently feast. The sharks are supposed to be so intelligent, in fact, that they seem to have set the whole movie up just so that they can get out into the Deep Blue Sea (hence the title). The most obvious problem with this idea is that the elements that cause the disaster that eventually leads to the crew being trapped are themselves completely outside of the scope of even these super-bright sharks.
Exhibit A: a monstrous storm
Exhibit B: an opportunity to take an arm off at the elbow
Exhibit C: a faulty winch on a helicopter
Exhibit D: big-ass explosions-- even though the fuel line had been expressly turned off
The best I can draw from all this is that these sharks are really good at taking advantage of opportunity when it knocks.
The peculiar nature of the sharks' intelligence, however, is inevitably aided by the amazing lack of intelligence evidenced by the crew, all of who are described as being at "the top of their game." (Apparently, their game is not "Survivor: Horror Movies.") From the very start we are presented with what can only be described as dumb, dumb, DUMB behavior: going skin diving with the sharks to remove a license plate from the mouth of one of the specimens; going out into the open water when the lights and cameras have been shut down (presumably by the sharks); crouching down near the head of a supposedly sleeping shark to make pithy remarks; standing right next to a big water entrance while making an inspirational speech; and heading down into the water-flooded sections of the base to retrieve some ill-described paperwork that's so important the lead scientist keeps it in her personal locker. And let's not forget constantly reaching out over the murky, shark-infested water to grab items that are just out of reach. If these yahoos can isolate a cure for Alzheimer's, I expect that a team of moderately competent grad students from UCSF will give us a cure for cancer any day now.
The best part of the movie, in my opinion, was the (uninentional?) snub paid to Leviathan and Deep Star Six: the black guy gets to attack the monster at the end, and live.
In short, I hope that the next team of scientists to go mucking about trying to get brain cures from the brains of encephallically enhanced sharks brings back a cure for silliness. It might have made the difference in this movie.
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