The View From The Mountain

I was looking forward to seeing Aquaman when I first heard it was announced. Mainly because I had already seen Aquaman in Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice (albeit in a small cameo) as well as Justice League . While the Justice League movie left a lot to be desired for me, Jason Momoa’s Aquaman was one of the few bright spots of that troubled production. His easy going ‘surfer dude’ take on Aquaman was a nice change of pace from the dark and brooding superheroes we’ve been getting up to that point from the DC comics movies (and even a few of the Marvel superhero films, too). The overly grim take on the DC superhero films (which also included Suicide Squad ) were a wrong turn courtesy of the Warner Brothers studio executives, who mistook the popularity of the Christopher Nolan Batman films to be that the audience preferred dreary superhero movies--when in fact the Nolan Batman films ( Batman Begin s/ The Dark Knight / The Dark Knight Rises ) were so popular because they were just v

You could have gone one of two ways with The Meg , play it straight, just like Steven Spielberg’s masterpiece Jaws , or go the comedic route, a la the Sharknado series. The main problem with The Meg is that it tries to have it both ways: it tries to be a deadly serious drama about a super-sized shark that terrorizes coastal China while also having goofy humor, and the result is that The Meg is just…meh. Based on the popular novel by Steve Alten, the concept of The Meg is based on a real life monster shark, the Megalodon, that lived back in the dinosaur age but went extinct millions of years ago. But The Meg posits that there’s more Megs than you can shake a shark cage at living under a layer of gas at the bottom of one of the deepest trenches in the ocean. And when a three person submarine pierces this layer of gas, it helps the Meg to reach the surface (Note: there’s virtually no mention of anybody going through decompression in this movie, much like how there’s virtually no men

Another good name for 47 Meters Down would be Mandy Moore Meets Jaws , because that’s pretty much the gist of this film: two adult sisters (played by Moore and Claire Holt) on vacation decide to go scuba diving in shark infested waters when something goes horribly awry and the sharks are served up a nice meal of two chicks in a cage on the bottom of the ocean. But another name for this film was In The Deep , and that’s no joke; In The Deep was actually what 47 Meters Down was originally called when it was very briefly released on video back in 2016. The movie was being dumped back then straight to video without a theatrical release, until something interesting happened. That was when The Shallows , starring Blake Lively as a lone surfer fending off an attacking shark, was released and became a hit. Reportedly, it was the success of The Shallows that made the producers of 47 Meters Down realize that there was money in dem there sharks, and they pulled their film from video releas