The Shallows Is Torture p**n, With a Shark

THE SHALLOWS Movie TRAILER # 3 (Shark Attack - 2016)

In July of 1945, during the final weeks of World War II, the USS Indianapolis was struck by a Japanese torpedo. The ship sank, leaving the survivors of the explosionsome 900 mento float, helplessly, in the Pacific. The crew sent SOS signals; help never came. What did come, however, were sharks, specifically oceanic whitetips, and the creatures proceeded to pick off the survivors one by one. The ordeal lasted for four days. Only 317 men would emerge alive from what remains the worst shark attack in history.

News of the horror that had befallen the crew of the Indianapolis contributed to a national anxiety that remains with us, and that has been both channeled and exacerbated by pop culture. Deep Blue Sea, Kon-Tiki, Dinoshark, Soul Surfer, Sharknados 1-3 (with the fourth installment, Sharknado 4: The 4th Awakens, planned for release in late July), and the many, many other films in the Jaws genre all of them summon the fear that sharks are not just predators, but alsomuch more than other powerful animals manage to bemonsters. Call it, if you want (though you probably shouldnt), fin-ema.

The Shallows is another entry in that genrea survival thriller about an epic battle of wits and wills that takes place between an American woman, Nancy Adams (Blake Lively), and a vicious shark. Nancy is a medical student who is reconsidering her lifes purpose after losing her mother to a long battle with cancer; as a kind of tribute, she travels to a deserted beach in Mexicothe same one her mother traveled to when she learned she was pregnant. She plans simply to surf the waters there as her mother had, but instead she encounters a Great Whiteand, it turns out, will keep encountering it. She gets bitten on her thigh; she spends the many hours after the bite occurs battling not just the shark but also hunger and dehydration and gangrene and the suns rays. A little bit Jaws, a little bit Blue Crush, a little bit 127 Hours, and a little bit Shark Week, The Shallows would seem to be a promising fusion of all the things we love to hate and hate to love about saw-toothed cartilaginous fishes.

Related Story

Consider the Left Shark

It is probably not a good sign that fairly soon into proceedings, serious questions emerge about the sharks motivations. Hunger alone doesnt seem to be driving him (Ill refer to him as a him, as Nancy does throughout the movie, though the audience isnt privy to the biological s*x of this modern-day megalodon). The ordeal begins with Nancy spotting a dead whale off the beach, and paddling toward it in curiosity; since Great Whites in particular have been known to feast on whale carcasses, and in fact likely derive a hefty portion of their total calories from whale blubber, then The Shallows, as far as the shark is concerned, is set in the parking lot of a Hometown Buffet. The shark also has other human victims in addition to Nancy; one of them washes up on the beach deceased but uneatenanother suggestion that the shark is more than simply hungry.

So then (and I belabor this point only because it is also the entire premise of this film): Is the shark territorial? Is the beach Nancy has been surfing his hunting ground? Which would make sense, except that (according to the many gorgeous aerial shots the film provides, of waters so crystalline as to reveal the particular typographies of the shallows floor) the beach in question seems to be home to precisely none of the animals that would normally be hunted by Great Whites. So then: Maybe the shark has somehow realized, on a spiritual level if not an intellectual one, that humans are responsible for the decline of the global shark population, and figures he should do his part to correct the imbalance? Or maybe he saw The Age of Adeline, and is seeking his revenge?

The answer, in the end, seems to be at once more boring and more interesting than any of those: This shark must simply be a s****t. He is like Jaws in Jawsand when it comes to Nancy in particular, for reasons that can be known to the shark alone, this time its personal. And so: The shark circles, malevolently, as orchestral strings swell. He waits, with an impressive amount of patience, for Nancy to be forced back into the water. He does what he can to knock her off her precarious perches: an outcropping of rock, the whale carcass, a buoy. He is, whatever Nancy does, and however long she waits, simply there. He isnt attacking her so much as he is stalking.

The Shallows bills itself as a suspense thriller, and suspenseful it certainly is. Its director, Jaume Collet-Serra, has taken the lessons of Jaws and made them his own: He understands, and employs to great effect, the power of the sharks-eye-view of a human frolicking on the surface of the water, and how the sound of a few taut, orchestral strings can set a collection of human nerves on edge, and the way Great Whites in particularbraun and brain, united by millions of years worth of evolutioncan summon humans deepest fears. Add to all that some lush, masterful cinematography, and a setting that might as well be a default screensaver of a Microsoft-circa-1999 desktop, and you have a film that is, all in all, a visual masterpiece.

The gorgeous visuals, though, are also part of its problem. The Shallows revels, despite its survival-driven storyline, in its various physical beautiesnot just those of its setting, but also those of its star. At the outset, when The Shallows is more Blue Crush and less Soul Surfer, we get several slow, languorous, almost-uncomfortably-close-up shots of Lively stripping down to her (tiny) bikini. And then rubbing sunscreen on her back, slowly and languorously (even though, moments later, shell don a neoprene jacket that will render that effort completely unnecessary). And then zipping that jacket up just enough to tighten her cleavage, but not to cover it. And then, once in the water, straddling her surfboard. Jaume Collet-Serra delights in angles that focus on the surface level of the water; what that amounts to when it comes to Lively, however, are a series of crotch shots.

This is a movie about a lady-surfer; you would expect, given that, a certain amount of lady-surfer-in-her-bathing-suit images. Compounding things, however, is the fact that the images The Shallows serves up arent just remarkably sexualized. Theyre also remarkably violent. Before she takes a beating from the shark, Nancy takes one from the ocean. She wipes out while surfing, and the camera dutifullybut not at all necessarilyprovides several close-up shots of her arms and legs getting pounded against rocks, and of her hair (loose, of course) tossed by currents in whiplash-y slo-mo. Even before the shark appeared, the audience in my screening was audibly gasping at the violence displayed onscreen.

In this, theres an uncomfortable dissonance: The camera has empathy for Nancy at one moment, and at the next suggests its own form of cinematic sadism. It carries messages about female empowerment, until it doesnt. The Shallows takes a saw-toothed villain and uses that as an excuse for a maritime version of Saw; it is, in the end, torture p**n that outsources its violence to the morally unaccountable realm of the natural world.

Hampering things further is the fact that the plot moves along not just through the battle of wills taking place between a human and a fish, but also through a series of improbable twists of bad luckthe result of cosmic accidents and also of people (and sharks, obviously) being mired in self-absorption. There are approximately 13 separate deus-ex-machina moments in the 87-minute movie, which suggest either that Nancy has exceptionally bad luck or that the films writer, Tony Jaswinski, is highly attuned to the zig-zagging nature of fate. Youve got to be kidding me, Nancy mutters as yet another unforeseen and highly improbable obstacle is thrown in her path.

When even the film itself acknowledges its own inconceivability, then there might be a problem. It would be one thing if The Shallows had been based, like Soul Surfer, on a true story, and thus obligated to the whims of history; the various punishments Nancy faces, though, come from a script. That makes their absurdities not merely absurd, but laughably so.

Thats unfortunate for everyone involved, but especially for Lively, who proves her star power in The Shallowsnot to mention an acting range never on display in Gossip Girl or any of her other projects. She is subtle when she needs to be, funny when she can be, all the while evincing a quiet determination that perfectly suits the demands, and the particular challenges, of the story in question. And Nancy herself is an engaging protagonist (her version of Tom Hankss Wilson is a seagull who ends up stranded with her after it too is injured by the sharka bird she ends up naming Steven Seagull). The Shallows should be a star vehicle for Lively; it likely will be.

But that doesnt make it good. The film could have been self-consciously campy in the manner of 1999s Deep Blue Sea, which featured Saffron Burrows fighting bio-engineered sharks-gone-rogue and was a thorough delight. Instead, The Shallows takes itself very, very seriouslyas a thriller; as Cinema; as a tale of survival; as a moody take on the enduring themes of (Wo)man Versus Nature and the Power of the Sea; as a vaguely feminist tribute to the independent and resourceful woman. (The song that plays during the closing credits is Sias Bird Set Free, whose lyrics include the lines Im not gon care if I sing off key/ I find myself in my melodies/ I sing for love, I sing for me/ I shout it out like a bird set free.) The Shallows was originally titled In the Deep, and its revealing that the two names selected for the movie are so profoundly self-contradictory. This is a film that doesnt seem to know what exactly it isor what exactly, given the extensive canon of shark cinema, it should be. All it knows is that sharks are scary and that Blake Lively is pretty; both are true, but as observations meant to drive a movie, they are also pretty shallow.

Source: http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2016/06/the-shallows-torture-p**n-with-a-shark/488432/