47 Meters Down

Dir: Johannes Roberts

2017

**

The shark attack genre, or Sharksploitation as its is sometime called, is littered with films that have very cool posters but fail to shock, scare or convince their audience. It is now a joke genre, full of films that are ‘so bad, they’re good’, although Shark Attack 3 is the only shark film I think is worthy of the title ‘best worst film’. The Shallows brought the genre back to a serious level in 2016 with a film that captured some of the mystery and suspense that made Jaws so popular back in the late 70s. 2018’s The Meg brought the fun back to the genre and made a shark movie a legitimate summer blockbuster once again. 2017’s 47 Meters Down is somewhere between the two. Sisters Lisa (Mandy Moore) and Kate (Claire Holt) are on vacation in Mexico after Lisa's boyfriend recently broke up with her. They decide to go swimming with sharks inside a diving cage with two local men they meet one night. The next day at the docks, Lisa is wary of the boat and its owner, Captain Taylor (Matthew Modine). Kate is a certified diver, but Lisa is new to diving. They lie to Taylor and tell him that Lisa is experienced. Unbeknownst to everyone, except the audience, the cable supporting the cage is fraying. As soon as Taylor sends Lisa and Kate down, the sisters are soon surrounded by great white sharks. However, the cable breaks, and the cage sinks to the bottom, which is 47 meters below the surface (hence the title) and out of communication range with the boat. Kate swims up seven meters to resume communication with Taylor, who tells her that Javier (Chris J. Johnson) will be coming down with a spare winch to attach to the cage. He advises them to stay in the cage because the sharks are close by. Both women are running out of air but soon see a flashlight in the distance. With Kate low on air from the previous swim, Lisa swims out to get Javier's attention. A shark tries to attack her but she miraculously avoids it. Lisa becomes disoriented about her position. Javier attempts to usher her back towards safety, but he is killed by a shark. Lisa takes Javier’s spear gun and the winch and swims back to the cage. The spare is attached but it also snaps and the cage sinks back down, landing on Lisa's leg, pinning her between the cage and the sea bed. Kate tells Taylor they are low on air and Lisa is trapped. He sends air tanks down and tells them the coast guard is an hour out. He also warns that the second tank may cause nitrogen narcosis, which can lead to hallucinations. Kate finds three flares to signal the coast guard. As she returns to the cage, she is attacked and presumably killed by a shark. Lisa uses the spear from the spear gun to pull a tank toward her and dons it, getting more air. Kate is shown to have survived her shark attack and makes it back to the cage but she is badly wounded and her blood is attracting more sharks. Lisa uses her BCD to lift up the cage, freeing her leg. Due to the nature of Kate's wounds, the sisters decide to swim to the surface, using one of the flares to scare the sharks. At the 20-meter mark, Taylor reminds them they must wait five minutes to decompress and avoid the bends. Kate accidentally drops the second flare and lights the third, discovering that they are surrounded by sharks. Taylor yells for them to drop their gear and make a break for the surface, and they swim as fast as they can. One of the sharks bites Lisa's leg but she escapes. Both women make it to the boat but Lisa is attacked again. She gouges out the shark's eye with the spear gun and it releases her. The men pull the sisters onto the boat, saving them. Then, in a rather disappointing twist, Lisa realizes that she has been hallucinating all this time due to nitrogen narcosis; she is still at the bottom of the ocean with her leg pinned under the cage. Coast guard divers arrive to rescue her and carry her to the surface. Lisa comes out of her hallucination and realizes that her sister is not with her, having actually been killed by the shark. The film is more Open Water rather than Jaws or The Shallows, although it certainly never achieves the same levels of thrill, dread or suspense. In a funny sort of way it feels like the twist ending was trying to elude to some sort of moral but the only moral to this story that I could tell was that you probably shouldn’t lie about having diving experience to a sailor (or swim into a sharks mouth). Jaws showed how it should be done decades ago by very rarely revealing the shark. It’s partly why people are scared of sharks, obviously their massive sharp teeth and the ability they have to eat you are their biggest points of dread but it is also the fact that you rarely see them coming. Swimmers are in their territory, they can breath under water, essentially if they want to eat you (which I realise they rarely want to do in reality), they can. Like many shark movies, 47 Meters Down portrays its sharks in a slightly exaggerated way, i.e. with more aggression. The film does retain as much of the classic aspects of shark behavior as possible, with the special effects unit looking at how the jaws behave when a shark attacks, what the gills are doing when it turns in anger, how fast is the tail moving to propel the massive body etc before exaggerating these movements a notch. Special effects company Outpost also had to craft believable water simulations for their shark scenes as the creatures pierced the surface. The studio also spent a significant amount of time establishing the right look of shark skin, especially when the sharks would surface above the water, glistening in the sun, wet, yet rubbery and thick. To replicate the organisms found underwater, finely chopped broccoli was added to the tank. Mandy Moore said it was quite unpleasant after a few weeks, comparing it to filming inside a soup. Quite how they managed to add CGI sharks among the murky waters is beyond me, they did well, but to be fair we don’t really see much of the sharks and certainly not in great detail. The stand out scene for me was when the girls light a flare as they are resurfacing in the dark. The outlines of the surrounding sharks are delicately lit in a menacing red light. The best thing I can say about the special effects is that they weren’t awful, as most effects are in shark movies. I didn’t care much for the set up and I didn’t care much for the twist ending, everything in between was typical shark movie fodder with few shark scenes. It has its moments but is largely forgettable. My biggest question however wasn’t where are all the sharks, but what is Matthew Modine doing here?