Deep Blue Sea (1999) Review

Deep Blue Sea (1999) Review

 

You would think a shark movie that has been deemed one of the best shark movies aside from Jaws (if not the best shark movie other than Jaws) might owe a fair bit to the greatest film ever made to feature a killer shark, right? Well, actually, Deep Blue Sea owes more to another all-time great Steven Spielberg flick, and that’s Jurassic Park, because Deep Blue Sea is a little less horror and a little more of a techno-thriller, but unlike Jurassic, it fully embraces being a B-movie and does not elevate the material to something more than just a killer animal/monster thriller. Is that a bad thing? Absolutely not, because it is definitively (not just definitely, definitively) one of the best films in the killer animal subgenre.

A scientist, Dr. Susan McCallister (Saffron Burrows) is being investigated by one of her financial backers (Samuel L. Jackson) after a test subject escapes its enclosure. Her place of research is Aquatica, an underwater facility in the middle of the ocean, and her subjects are genetically-engineered mako sharks. Normally these sharks aren’t that dangerous to humans, as Susan’s shark wrangler Carter (Thomas Jane) explains. The only problem is Susan and her partner in crime, Jim (Stellan Skarsgard) have broken the rules and bred sharks with bigger brains so they can suck more brain juice out of them to create a cure for Alzheimer’s. This results in three extremely intelligent, deadly, and hungry mako sharks, one of which is forty-five-feet in length. A tropical storm botches an aerial emergency evacuation, and the resulting explosion plunges Aquatica into fiery disarray—as well as frees the sharks from their pen. The group of survivors must fight their way to the surface and escape the sinking facility, as well as the relentless sharks.

The performances in Deep Blue Sea are not all great, but the casting is. When you think of Samuel L. Jackson, the first thing you think of is probably him playing a rough and tough dude in a crime movie or a person of authority in an action or drama film, but Jackson has dabbled in his fair share of creature features, too. In fact, one of his first major roles in a summer blockbuster was Jurassic Park. Obviously you can’t forget about Snakes on a Plane, too, but I think Deep Blue Sea is the best B-movie he’s been in. He plays a rich businessman who is famous for surviving an avalanche in the Alps, but there’s some dark mystery surrounding that traumatic event. He eventually lays it all out for the group in order to motivate them to survive the situation they are now in and not lose it on each other. It’s a great speech, but don’t let me give you the wrong impression, because while Jackson is the actor with the most star power in the cast, no one is safe from these sharks. I wonder if the director put all the characters on a roulette wheel and spun it to decide who got to die and who got to live. The characters who stick around longer get a bit more development, but overall most of the people are entertaining. You think you know who will die before the end, but it subverts your expectations a bit, and the majority of the deaths are at least creative or gruesome or both.

Any good killer animal movie has someone who provides much needed comedy relief to give some levity to the situation, and in this one it’s the token rapper/African American character, played by LL Cool J. He’s a chef with a foul-mouthed pet parrot, and he carries my favourite scene: a shark pursues him into his flooded kitchen and he has to evade it. The action is inventive, entertaining, and satisfying, no more so than in this scene. What helps Deep Blue Sea avoid getting boring during the shark-free scenes are the relatable characters and the constant danger everyone is in. In one scene the sharks are trying to eat them, and in the next scene they’re trying to avoid drowning from the sudden flood of sea water as the facility crumbles. The action has a good ebb and flow, but there are some great scares and shocking moments throughout, too. This was one of the earliest R-rated movies I saw, and it thrilled me more than it scared me (for the record, Jaws scared me more), but it doesn’t go too overboard with cursing and explicit gore. It strikes an effective and satisfactory balance.  

There are many far-fetched concepts and moments throughout, but nothing so idiotic that it takes me out of what’s going on. I won’t get into all of it, but I will say the shark “science” in particular is pretty ridiculous. It’s as if the screenwriters watched one episode of Shark Week, jotted down a few notes, and mistook themselves for experts. “Sharks can’t swim backwards!” one of the characters declares, even though one of the makos just did. These sharks are so smart, you see, that they’ve learned behaviours no other sharks are capable of, including sneaking up, breaking through doors to purposefully flood certain levels, and reading the script really well so they show up at just the right time and don’t miss their cues. Not only did the screenwriters get some things wrong, the special effects crew did, too: they painted green stripes on a mako shark and called it a tiger shark, even though it is clearly the same design as the mako. Don’t mistake this for criticism of the SFX, though—a B-movie though it may be, they didn’t skimp on the budget.

Even as a fan of Jaws, I have to admit that the animatronic shark is not one of the best examples of an animatronic creature in a movie. Most shark movies before the advent of CGI relied on animatronics that looked worse than what was in the original Jaws, or subbed in footage of real sharks and tried to play it off like the actors were in the same water, even though they usually weren’t. Despite coming out a few years after CGI had become a new standard for creature special effects, Deep Blue Sea features animatronic sharks, and they are easily the most realistic-looking sharks in any movie ever. There are some shots where the sharks are CGI, and these looked kind of goofy even in 1999, so nowadays they look really bad, but those animatronic sharks are still effective, and the choice of featuring a species different from the standard great white was smart, because the mako shark is, in reality, one of the scariest looking sharks, and while the design isn’t 100% accurate, it’s very close, and very freaky. 

Why, exactly, does this movie owe so much to Jurassic Park? It’s more than just the cutting-edge sci-fi mumbo jumbo. Aquatica is like an undersea version of the theme park, a tropical storm plunges them into their survival situation, the intelligent sharks are like the intelligent Velociraptors (hell, one of them even attacks someone in a kitchen!), Carter is the expert leading them to safety, Susan is the blind mastermind who caused the whole disaster despite good intentions, and it’s more about the action and the thrills than the horror, but still about that, too. I’ve seen it so many times I’ve practically memorized every scene, but I still find it re-watchable despite some poorly-aged aspects, and it is still worth checking out if you’ve never seen it or haven’t seen it in a long time.

Deep Blue Sea is a must-see shark movie. I think it holds up pretty well, but you may not agree, depending on if you prefer more serious thrillers of this nature like Jaws or Rogue or The Edge. Normally I would wrap it up here, but because I’m hoping some readers who read this review don’t know anything about it, I’m going to do a little spoiler section to end off for those who are familiar with it.

Ok, spoilers! I couldn’t do a review of Deep Blue Sea and not comment on one of the most shocking movie deaths ever. You would think Samuel L. Jackson, the biggest star in the movie, would make it to the end, right? Nope! Deep Blue Sea may owe a bit to Alien, as well, because many of the cast members at the time were not well-known, and the filmmakers wanted it to be a guessing game as to who would live and who would become shark bait, as well as have a purposefully unexpected death to really catch the audience off guard. Prior to the third act, LL Cool J’s character makes a comment about how black guys don’t fare well in these kinds of movies—err, situations—but then they do a reversal and, surprise, he actually escapes the jaws of death and survives to the end! Like I said, I’ve seen this movie way too many times, but I have to give credit where credit’s due in subverting the expectations of those who watch these kinds of movies all the time and hooking viewers who might otherwise avoid them. Also, the way the sharks are killed are like mini-remakes of the endings of each film in the Jaws sequel trilogy: the second shark dies by getting electrocuted, just like the shark in Jaws 2, and the first and last shark both get blown up (like in Jaws: The Revenge and Jaws 3-D, with the first one even getting scorched by flames like in Jaws 2). While Deep Blue Sea may not be on a level even close to Jaws or Jurassic Park, it’s still pretty entertaining in its own right, and is a hell of a lot better than any of the Jaws sequels.