Deep Blue Sea Review
by Stephen Graham Jones (lisgj AT LIB DOT TTU DOT EDU)October 5th, 1999
The Jaws structure works because it's simple: oversized shark enters isolated community, begins feeding, has a few good kills and chase scenes, then is in turn chased and killed, largely because the whole meal-thing got a little too personal somewhere along the way. Man versus nature, intellect against instinct, all that. Deviate too far and you don't have a shark-movie anymore. Duncan Kennedy and Wayne Powers were aware of this during writing, and it shows. Deep Blue Sea is a shark movie, this time set out on a Waterworld-ish compound, complete even with another anti-social man from Atlantis, right down to the haircut, sleeveless wetsuit, and underwater acrobatics: Carter Blake (Thomas Jane) the soon-to-be-redeemed ex-con. And of course his chums, led by the overworked Samuel Jackson and rounded out by the beautiful-anywhere Saffron Burrows, playing a female Victor von, LL Cool J in the mix there somewhere, in another unreprised yet still entertaining role (see H20). The low point of the movie is everytime his alcoholic preacher character tries to get metaphysical. The high point is the sharks: Renny Harlin (Die Hard 2, Cliffhanger, Long Kiss Goodnight ) knows how to put an action sequence together in the computer, and has plenty of opportunity. Remember the floating cow in Twister? Deep Blue Sea has a similar moment with the floating leg/twitching foot of a recently-bitten-in-half crewman. But yes, the structure is Jaws all the way, what with the waterborne Aquatica compound, the isolating storm, the sharks fenced in so they can't leave.
Yes, plural sharks. In keeping with Anaconda, Lake Placid, Ghost & the Darkness (Jaws 3), etc., there's not just one of them anymore. That would be too easy. And they're makos this time, which have a cooler color scheme anyway. Needless to say, these sharks are vatgrown, genetically-enhanced, smart. Pretty much Benchley's Creature without the bothersome legs. We get the gist of this via some particularly clunky exposition, where Jackson's Russel Franklin--the cashcow of Aquatica, there to pull the plug unless the good doctors can convince him otherwise--gets the grand tour.
What perhaps saves Deep Blue Sea from being just another Jaws sequel is the awareness that this isn't 1975. Not just talking animatronics here, either, but pop knowledge: we know too much about sharks by now to listen to a Dreyfuss character wax poetic about feeding habits, rogue behavior, life cycles, etc. This can all be assumed, and is. In addition, there's enough environmental guilt circulating that if these sharks weren't essentially man-made (see: Godzilla) their eventual destruction would be pretty much unwarranted, (see: King Kong) in spite of the havoc they wreak. What perhaps doesn't save Deep Blue Sea from being just another Jaws sequel is when it tries really hard not to be, which is to say when it tries to supplant Spielberg's underwater POV's we know love and expect with overwater character history, motivations, revelation, all that small Sphere-type drama. At least there's no love sub-plot. Just a lot of people getting ripped apart, which is what we paid to see.
(c) 1999 Stephen Graham Jones
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