In Honor of Shark Week: Let’s Talk About Deep Blue Sea

Some folks might ask, ‘why’, and they wouldn’t be out of line to do so really since Deep Blue Sea was more for shock and awe value with a good deal of humor injected into it than it was about being scientific. It’s true, sharks can’t really swim backward all that well thanks to the manner in which their body is formed, but at the same time they know how to simply let their bodies drift backward. So it’s a limited movement, but they do know how to go backward. Plus, as smart as these sharks are, and they’re given a pretty good amount of intelligence given that the humans finally realize they’re being ‘herded’ in order to flood the facility in a brutally efficient manner, it’s still not quite as believable as the fictional quality of the movie would have you believe. Okay, so it’s a given that sharks aren’t stupid, but they’re not possessed of the same thought processes as humans, because if they were then the ocean would be one giant kill zone the moment a human stepped out into it, provided that sharks started targeting human beings.

In honor of Shark Week this is just one of the many movies that is likely going to be watched by many people since obviously it is somewhat entertaining if you want to sit and watch a horror movie without allowing your brain to function on full or even half throttle. While Jaws was something that managed to scare the living hell out of people back in the day this one seemed poised to deliver a full shot of nightmare fuel since it upped the ante in such a big way. Three sharks, all of them that made Jaws look like a guppy, were housed in an underwater complex that featured titanium-reinforced chainlink fences that rose at least ten to twelve feet off the water, and were basically too high for even a well-motivated shark to jump. Now let’s tack on the fact that one of the sharks was seen to have gotten out of containment before the movie really got going, and was for some reason toying with a luxury yacht with four people aboard. Then in true movie fashion the shark attacked and knocked the people off the boat and would have had them if not for Carter, who had somehow caught up to the shark, presumably by a tracking device. What was the shark’s game plan, to just run away and not come back? Perhaps cause some mayhem along the way? There wasn’t a lot of explanation that went into this escape, or a lot of concern since Carter was on his own when he recaptured the shark.

But wait, there’s more! I like this movie, so don’t get too defensive if you do too, but there are some huge, glaring errors that you can only forgive if you’re watching it to be entertained and don’t want to bother worrying over the details. For instance, the sharks taking out the cameras. Are they really that smart that they know how to take them all out and then kill the power? If that’s the case why didn’t they do it some time ago and really mess the station up with a full compliment of people on it for mass hysteria and damage? It’s almost as though the sharks were picking their moment an waiting until there was a skeleton crew on the station to strike. Then there’s the matter of the shark throwing the dismembered doctor into the window so hard that it broke. Did anyone see the size of the chunk of glass was that chipped out of the window? It was huge! In fact it was the size of a kids soccer ball almost, which leads to the impossibility of it happening not only because of the force needed to crack that thick glass that was HOLDING BACK an entire OCEAN, but with the doctor secured to a stretcher and creating the kind of drag that would lessen the force it’s kind of easy to say, nuh-uh, not happening. And on top of that, the shark let go of the doctor as it flung the stretcher into the window, which as you can guess in open water would deaden any momentum quickly as per foot the stretcher, which was parallel to the window and not perpendicular, which might have reduced any drag, would have slowed down considerably. In other words the doctor, who should have drowned at that point already, would be dying in front of the others in that instant if he hadn’t already expired.

There are so many other things to point out about this movie but I’ve been enough of a buzzkill and will only say that enjoying it is easy if you turn your brain off for a couple of hours, as in terms of shark movies it’s actually several steps above many others. But it’s easy to think that by now you’re going to be watching for at least a couple of things in the movie.Jaws