The Meg

• Directed by Jon Turteltaub
• August 10, 2018 (US)
• Loosely based on the 1997 novel Meg: A Novel of Deep Terror by Steve Alten

A group of scientists and a rescue diver encounter a megalodon while on a rescue mission on the Mariana Trench.

The Meg is a big dumb shark movie. And I’m not referencing the size of the shark and I’m certainly not insulting the film. It’s just fun and aims to entertain. There are great visuals and just entertaining characters and it is an overall fun story. This is a monster movie with a prehistoric creature and enough possibility in what’s occurring that it comes off as almost believable. 

And it doesn’t hurt that Jason Statham is in this as disgraced deep-sea rescue expert Jonas Taylor. At this point in his career a giant shark is probably the only thing that he could possibly go up against as he’s beaten everything else other than The Rock, but I think he could’ve kicked Dwayne Johnson’s ass in Fast & Furious 6 if that parking garage had not given way.

There’s plenty of humor in this, but not to the point that it kills the suspense or the action, or anything that they may be building up. That’s a very delicate balancing act and all too often when directors go heavy on the humor, they tend to go too heavy and ruin the movie or at least harm it overall. It is a skill once common among action directors that became lost sometime after the 80s. You still need a feel that whatever is going on is serious for the characters. 

And it doesn’t hurt that the characters are likable to one extent or another. Even Rainn Wilson’s billionaire character of Jack Morris has a level of likability even if he is ultimately a dick. You have to be a dick to not alert people that there’s a giant prehistoric shark roaming around. He is a character that often states the obvious such as mentioning using a tracker for the film’s villain.

In a movie like The Meg most if not all of the characters should feel that they are quite possibly on the menu. Often in such cases, the people behind the movie or any movie where characters will get killed off in large numbers focus their energies on crafting the ones that will survive while leaving the ones that are to die quite shallow. Everybody gets just enough that when they die it’s shocking because you don’t want them to die. They give them relationships and just enough that they are people you can identify with and attach yourself too. 

Something that I found interesting is that the relationship between Jonas and his ex-wife Lori (Jessica McNamee) isn’t overtly hostile. There’s still some affection there though it’s not enough affection to get them to get back together. They’re friendly. In film it’s often they still have feelings and there’s no real good reason they divorced or it goes to the other extreme that they hate each other in which case they begrudgingly come to an understanding by the end of the story. Here they are just friends who mistook friendship for love.

This is much more of an action film and much less of a nature’s revenge type film and at two odd hours The Meg movie doesn’t feel like it. Yet they pack so much in that you think it’s longer. I would swear up and down that this was 90 minutes and on the same token given how much occurs and how many different characters there are it just feels like it should be closer to three. The movie itself just never really lets up. It just keeps going and going.

The people behind this movie understood exactly what they were making. They didn’t think of this as something more than a monster movie with a veneer of science to give it possibility. They understood it was not Oscar caliber and set out to entertain. An important mindset to have as they do not stop the story to try for an attempt at depth that the film does not need or warrant. The closest we get to pontification is people saying humans should not go down as deep as they did in this story which is a logical reaction for the characters.

One thing does bother me though. In the finale I just don’t know why the megalodon would go to a beach. I get why Jaws would go to the beach, but I can’t find a good reason why a giant shark that can eat whales would go to an area with stuff that amounts to less than bite-sized food for it. I would think it would roam the oceans looking for whales and what not to eat. Then again if it did that we wouldn’t have a movie ending. 

The Meg is one of those great fun movies that Hollywood should make more of. It’s entertaining and exciting and action packed. You can watch it a dozen times or more and enjoy it as much as the first. If you haven’t checked this out, you most certainly should!