Thursday, April 12, 2018

Fun with Megalodon: First Trailer

Well, the trailer is out for The Meg, and I'm not sure what to think.  The summer blockbuster-to-be from Steve Alten's novel could be a fun monster movie, like King Kong, or it could be a suspenseful undersea adventure movie, like the Abyss, but the American trailer (I've heard there's another for Europe that emphasizes the suspense side) looks like it's trying to get both audiences, which is very hard to do well.  (The original Jurassic Park hit the sweet spot of suspense and fun, as did Jackson's Kong: the recent American Godzilla was visually amazing but didn't quite get either side right.)  We don't see any discussion of the science in the trailer, but that's okay: no one went to Kong expecting scientific explanations, and indeed not a word was said about it on screen.

What I like:
They gave up on the movie's glowing albino shark (even if that's possible, it says to prey "here I come!") and basically did a giant great white shark, which is fine: no one knows exactly what Meg looked like, thanks to the very limited fossilization of any cartilage-based skeleton. 
There's a giant squid in it.
The underwater lab and submersibles look cool.
The trench ecosystem, possible or not, looks cool.
The Shark Week joke.

What I don't:
The shark looks different sizes in different shots.  This problem plagues giant-creature movies going all the way back to the original King Kong, but Peter Jackson's Kong shows you can do it right. (Maybe they couldn't get Andy Serkis to play the shark.)
Statham/Jonas (again, just from one trailer: he might be much better in the film) looks tough but  humorless and not very interesting.
I don't think the ecosystem shown at great depths is possible, or that the shark could survive the trip to surface waters.  To be fair, both these things have to be assumed: there's no other way to make the story work. 
I hate Beyond the Sea.

We'll see if the movie hits the spot or jumps the megalodon (I wanted to be the first to use that line.)


2 comments:

Laurence Clark Crossen said...

I'm guessing you must know the giant Toulouse earthworm did not actually go extinct?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rhyWlu4LaXk&feature=em-uploademail
"10 AMAZING Animals We Thought Were Extinct But Aren't!"

Matt Bille said...

Cool! Too bad Megalodon did.