Isn’t Jaws the ultimate movie to compare any shark movie with? Whever that toothy great whole is seen on the screen, someone of the memory rushes back to Jaws and that rush engulfs your thoughts. Well, well.I am not going to compare this movie to it, just because it is rather little less memorable. Spanish Director Jaume Collet-Serra has brought a script that could have been prepared within 5-minutes prior to a management meeting, but what instils in it is a Friday-night survival-horror hokum, with decent clever wrinkles.
We have seen many survival movies like Castaway, Jaws, Frozen(one with three friends stuck on a ski-lift), so now it is known there are three basic stints that needs to be fulfilled to have an amazing survival story. The first one being – a real, relatable character, who is just not stupid enough to go about surfing, alone, without friends. Making all the idiotic moves and gets killed.(Does anyone remember Money from Don’t Breathe?). Thankfully, our protagonist Nancy(Blake Lively) is a medical student, on a break after she loses her mother to cancer. Fighting with bravery and lost the battle, she visits Mexico, the paradise where her mom first found out that she was pregnant with her. Reliving through some times that brought back memory of her mother. Isn’t that soppy, but beautiful!
The second stint – a setup. Any survival horror, needs to completely draw the surrounding that is going to be the horror for next few minutes. And through cinematographer Flavio Labiano’s lens, everything is sketched to such perfection. The beach, no name is mentioned, looks like a dream snatched out to reality. The clear sean water, showing the sandy bottom, long distances without trace of humans, serene and calmness that can make anyone wish to have a dive in that cool water. But apart from all this tranquillity, beneath the water lurks a shark – particularly a dangerously famished one!
During a surfing session, the shark attacks Nancy, biting on her leg, injuring her and leaving her alone on a rock, in the middle of the ocean, 200 meters away from the shore. She can see her way out, but can’t swim to safety. She cannot get off the rock, but have to come up with a plan soon because this rock will be submerged when it’s time for high tide.
Last stint, that is almost an unsaid law of any survival movie – only character’s wits that should save them. There is no space for superheroics in movies like these!
So let me just say that The Shallows is a ‘good movie’, not ‘great movie’. I am saying this because the movie just falls shorts of being ‘it’.
Blake Lively plays a role with utmost conviction and those expressions of fear, anger, contemplation and lastly, courage, just draws more out the character. Mostly I think she did grab this role for her surf-body. But she proved more than that.
There are few scenes that really do manage to bring out the blood-chilling thrills. One with silhouette of big white shark while Lively is seen cutting the wave, really does seem gripping. The use of GoPro camera to give an extra self-present effect, like you are present in that same water as the shark, works effectively. CG shark eating a half-body of human, totally gruesome!
What I fail to understand is, having a CG beast lurking the water that seems to be threatened by Lively’s presence, which is really unrealistic for a cold-blooded predator and nitpicking as well.
The film lives up to its name but could’ve had more depth, and maybe few years down the line it will be forgotten, or merely referred as ‘Blake Lively shark movie’. I am stating this because, after coming sooo far and creating such a good thrill, it falls short at the end, and its maddening.simply maddening!
A one-time watch to feel the rush, the picturesque and, last but not the least, Blake Lively.