By now, us movie lovers know exactly how the year of movies is going to play out. Jan-Feb are Hollywood dumping grounds. There are hardly, if ever, any movies worth seeing that aren't late-December Oscar bait leftovers. March-April give us some quieter movies but prepare us for summer. May-August is Summer movie blockbuster fare. Sept-Oct are much like the first two months but with an overabundance of cheaply made horror films. Nov-Dec is Oscar time (probably the best months to see movies). However, there are exceptions (ie The Lego Movie came out in Feb). One of the biggest exceptions to the summer blockbusters are those sleeper movies that are very good but go under the radar. Last year it was Ex Machina. Two years ago it was Chef and Snowpiercer. This year (though I haven't seen Swiss Army Man yet), the label of quietly good summer movie could go to The Shallows.
I'm a big fan of aquatic monster movies. As a kid I grew up watching Jaws, Deep Blue Sea, Lake Placid, Anaconda, etc. The best ones were the ones on opposite ends of the spectrum. Either it's terrifying and serious like Jaws or campy and ridiculous like Deep Blue Sea. The ones that try to combine the two normally turn out pretty blah (Shark Night 3D-- terrible). The Shallows, even though it does have a couple of moments of camp, generally stays in the tension-filled thriller category like Jaws. The film follows Nancy (Blake Lively) as she treks her way to a secluded secret paradise of a beach that her late mother had visited several years earlier. She's out to contemplate several important life decisions as well as come to terms with her mother's death. She does this by surfing. Whilst in the water, she is attacked by a shark. She finds a small rock formation several hundred yards from the shore and takes shelter away from the killer shark. However, she knows that by nightfall, the tide will rise and she'll be back in the water with the shark.
So, the film is essentially Castaway but with a shark. Or Buried but instead of a coffin-- yeah... it's with a shark. The film relies solely on Blake Lively to carry it, which is what worried me going into it and what surprised me after seeing so many positive reviews. I can't exactly put my finger on it, but I just don't like her. There is nothing particularly wrong with her (nothing particularly special, either), I haven't seen her in much and she hasn't been that bad in anything, but for some reason I just can't stand her. For me, the biggest drawback for seeing the film was her. However, though she doesn't necessarily blow me away with her performance, she was serviceable and the least irritating I've ever seen her. She carries the movie on her shoulders and does a decent job. I actually found myself rooting for her every once in awhile, which was surprising.
I guess most of the movie was surprising to me, actually. There was a lot stacked against the movie. It was a shark attack movie that garnered a PG-13 rating, but the violence, blood and terror in the film aren't necessarily lacking. In fact, there are a couple of shots where I don't know how they got away with anything less than an R. Blake Lively didn't necessarily strike me as an actor strong enough to carry a movie alone, but she did fine. And director Jaume Collet-Serra doesn't necessarily have the best track record (previous movies include Unknown, Non-Stop, and House of Wax... though I did like Run All Night) and to make a movie with one actor vs. one shark is a difficult task to accomplish. And while the result is far from Jaws, it's probably the best shark movie since. It's also a beautifully shot film. The shots of the ocean, the beach, the waves, the underwater creatures, everything. It's actually a sight to see before during and after the thrills begin. The whole movie could legitimately be a screensaver. It's that beautiful.
At the end of the day, yes, it boils down to a shark attack movie, but it's a very well-written, well-shot, and well-acted shark attack movie. Through the combination of practical effects and a CGI shark, the shark does look very creepy. There were only a couple of instances where I was taken out of the terror by thinking to myself that the shark looked fake or the CGI was lacking (because there's really not a ton of it). And, the last two minutes of the film is the most cringe-worthy of the entire movie (no, that's not a good thing) and should've been cut entirely. However, while The Shallows is probably only going to make a moderate amount of money, it looks like it's going to be one of the few underrated sleeper hits of the summer. If any part of the film interested you, I urge you to seek it out, just to see the gorgeous cinematography and have a little bit of fun.
B
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