The Shallows -- a review


There has to be a better way to get an Oscar than this!

When I studied writing in college, I was taught that there are three basic stories: man verses man, man verses himself, and man verses nature. The Shallows is definitely the latter version of classic story-telling: man verses nature. Although, in this case, it’s actually woman verses nature. Blake Lively plays Nancy, a med-school drop out who’s doing a surfing tour of Mexico after the death of her mother. Her mom’s death has shattered her to the point where she wonders aloud to her father about what’s the point to it all. Why go on, she muses, with such loss all around us?

But Nancy gets a hard lesson in the basics of survival when she goes surfing in a secluded cove on the Mexican coast. Unknowingly swimming right into the feeding ground of a Great White Shark, Nancy becomes stranded on a rock outcropping that’s just 200 feet from shore. Yet she doesn’t dare try to swim for it, because the monstrous shark is actively hunting her. And so it becomes a waiting game between her and the shark, but the major problem for her being the rock outcropping she’s stranded on will be underwater come high tide.


I saved the camera! I'll still be updating the vlog today! Woot!

The Shallows could have been really bad. God knows there are plenty of bad shark movies out there--some of which are enjoyable in a “so bad it’s good” kind of way, like Red Water. But thanks to a solid script and direction from Jaume Collet-Serra, as well as a great, sympathetic performance by Blake Lively, The Shallows is a gripping thriller that keeps you on the edge of your seat for its entire running time. The reason it’s so gripping is that the filmmakers (as well as Lively) make you care deeply about what happens to Nancy because she’s presented here as a three-dimensional human being.

The shark, which looks to be mainly a creation of CGI is still menacing enough to be scary. The director wisely keeps it off screen for most of the movie, only bringing it into full view for the terrifying climax. But for the majority of the running time of the movie, the story sits on Lively’s slender shoulders, and she handles it very well. She has a great screen presence, and the movie wouldn’t have worked as well without her. If you’re looking for a good shark flick worthy of Jaws, then wade into The Shallows. --SF

Comments

Explorer From Another World

It’s Friday night during the summer in Beutter county, an idyllic farming community in Indiana, and the good folks are settling in for what should be another humdinger of an evening. Until their plans are shattered by the arrival of an Explorer From Another World! This turns out to be an alien (Gemma Sterling) who starts savagely killing people from the moment it disembarks from its flying saucer. Local kids Eddie (Colin McCorquodale), Marybeth (Sage Marchand) and Culpepper (Nolan Gay) are planning on seeing a movie, but it looks like they’ll be battling for the very survival of the human race instead! Explorer From Another World is a wonderfully done throwback to the B-movies of the 1950s and 1960s. Ably directed by Woody Edwards (who gives himself a small cameo as Hank in the sheriff’s jail cell), the film is forty five minutes long, but manages to tell its torrid but funny story very effectively in the time allotted. And the short running time tracks when you...

Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice -- a review

Despite coming out thirty six years after the first film, Beetlejuice Beetlejuice , once again directed by Tim Burton, wound up being vastly entertaining, adding lots of pleasant surprises, like the use of stop-motion animation. The sequel takes place within the same real-life time frame, with Lydia Deetz, played with wry humor by Winona Ryder, now the host of a ghost hunting show. She’s also the mother of Astrid, a teenager played by Jenna Ortega. They live with Delia Deetz (the always great Catherine O'Hara), Lydia’s step-mother and Astrid’s step-grandmother. After the death of Charles--Delia’s husband and Lydia’s father--during a bird-watching accident involving sharks, the Deetz ladies must go back up to the creepy house in Winter River, Connecticut for his funeral. This is the same place where Lydia first encountered Beetlejuice all those years ago, and she is understandably reluctant to even mention his name, lest she accidentally calls forth Beet...

My Top Five of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds is returning (finally!) on the 17th of July with an all-new third season. To celebrate the return what has become my favorite of the new Star Trek shows on Paramount+, I decided to create a list of my top five episodes from the first two seasons. Memento Mori After several episodes of hinting at their presence, Memento Mori is the first big confrontation between the Federation and the Gorn. First introduced in the TOS episode Arena , with a memorable fight between Captain Kirk and a slow moving, green-skinned humanoid lizard, the Gorn have popped up in the episode The Time Trap of ST: The Animated Series , and in the In A Mirror, Darkly Part Two episode of ST: Enterprise (using really bad CGI that wasn’t much of an improvement over the Gorn suit used in Arena ). We never actually see the Gorn in Memento Mori , except for their ships, which look like angry claws ripping their way through space. This is a wise move, because not showing the...

The View From The Mountain

Search This Blog