Considering how cinematic the creatures can be under the right circumstances, it’s a shame that shark movies are so frequently not worth their salt. There are exceptions. Jaws was the genesis of the summer blockbuster, and the first masterpiece of director Steven Spielberg’s acclaimed career. The underrated genre craftsman Jaume Collet-Serra also delivered finely tuned aquatic thrills with his exemplary 2016 bone-cruncher The Shallows. But between Z-tier entries like some of Jaws’ own sequels, the recent dead-on-arrival Netflix film Under Paris, and whatever the Sharknado movies are supposed to be, film buffs looking to get their Carcharodon on have remarkably few options that don’t belong in the bargain bin.
Yet there’s one more shark movie that has managed to stand the test of time since it came out in theaters 25 years ago: Renny Harlin’s Deep Blue Sea, which was released on July 28, 1999. The science-fiction thriller about “smart” mako sharks received a lukewarm reception on release, garnering praise for its suspense and plethora of gory shark action, but was marked down for its cheese-ball tone and shaky script. The movie isn’t perfect, and we’ll get to the story behind its oddball ending shortly, but revisiting Deep Blue Sea a quarter century later reveals a movie that’s held up a lot better than you’d expect. Let’s look at why Deep Blue Sea deserves, if not the gold, certainly at least the bronze.
Deep Blue Sea and Smart Sharks
The setup of Deep Blue Sea is about as classic as they come. It’s a “trapped in the house” monster movie, with the twist of the house being an underwater facility for Alzheimer’s research, and the monsters being three sharks who’ve had their intelligence increased by the science team’s experiments. Whereas most shark films feature natural sharks that have become more aggressive towards humans for unknown reasons (unless we’re counting the voodoo curse explanation from the novelization of Jaws: The Revenge, which, yes, really happened), Deep Blue Sea gives the sharks a tangible “goal” as antagonists beyond eating anyone below second billing: to break free of the facility they were raised in and escape into the wild.
It may sound odd at first blush, but giving both the humans and sharks “motivations” that we can understand is what makes Deep Blue Sea stand out from other shark films. It allows the two factions to have back and forth as the characters try to escape the slowly crumbling facility, turning the whole film into a subconscious chess match of setup and payoff. The pacing and suspense that most critics cited as the film’s best aspects largely comes from this creative decision, and it’s one that balances well with its campy tone. The strong foundational mechanics of what is happening provides a solid base that the funny character beats and over-the-top kills, the how it’s happening, can effectively bounce off of.
It also helps that despite the “smart” shark gimmick, the movie knows not to push the idea too far to the point of breaking the suspension of disbelief. The sharks are smart enough to corral their prey through the environment and recognize the function of gear like guns or security cameras, but they’re not so smart that they no longer feel like animals. The sharks are most reminiscent of the velociraptors from Jurassic Park; they’re clever, but not masterminds. Striking that sweet spot is what keeps the film from falling over into parody territory even though it’s often quite funny. To make a movie’s stakes serious even though it’s also hilarious is not an easy task, and the credit for that has to go to the film’s strong direction.
Make Mine Mako
Deep Blue Sea was directed by Renny Harlin, who at that point in his career was best known for action thrillers with a humorous tinge. Some of the most well-known examples of his work before Deep Blue Sea include Die Hard 2, the Sylvester Stallone vehicle Cliffhanger, and the particularly excellent Shane Black-written action-comedy The Long Kiss Goodnight. All of those movies, along with the infamous (but honestly not terrible) box office bomb Cutthroat Island, showcase Harlin’s preference for tactile action beats and strong sequence design. His movies don’t always hold together perfectly, instead often featuring signature sequences that stand out in a viewer’s memory, such as the nail-biting opening set piece of Cliffhanger, the incredible boat explosion in Cutthroat Island, or Russell Franklin’s (Samuel L. Jackson) surprise death in Deep Blue Sea.
That last one is a prime example of Harlin’s strengths because even people who haven’t seen the movie are often at least aware of Jackson’s death scene. It’s a perfectly calculated beat, with the big heroic speech you’d expect at a dark moment by the character you think is about to take charge suddenly subverted by him being violently killed off. It’s even set up moments before the speech when Carter Blake (Thomas Jane) makes an off-hand comment about not standing too close to the pool, something Franklin does anyway.
The playfulness with which Harlin approaches the big shark scenes never takes away from how terrifying the creatures are supposed to be. Although some of the CG shots haven’t aged all that gracefully, the animatronic shots are spectacular, giving the sharks a real sense of weight and menace.
If Jaws is the epitome of a masterfully crafted crowd-pleaser and The Shallows is the most relentlessly brutal shark thriller, Deep Blue Sea is the best example of a shark movie that knowingly enters camp-classic territory. It’s absolute B-movie nonsense in concept, yet it punches above its weight class by being executed with confidence and style. Even with the cheesier elements, the film still works as a well-paced thrill ride, cementing its place in the shark movie pantheon. However, it’s not all sunshine under the sea, because Deep Blue Sea does have one key flaw we have to discuss. Strangely, it’s a flaw that the movie nearly avoided, if not for one poor choice in post-production.
Blood in the Water
Because of its campy approach, the cast of characters in Deep Blue Sea are mostly a collection of archetypes. Thomas Jane’s Carter Blake is your macho but good-hearted hero, Samuel L. Jackson’s Russell Franklin is the authority figure who gets sacrificed to cement the stakes, and LL Cool J’s Sherman “Preacher” Dudley is on hand for comic relief. The characters are intended to be functional and charismatic, which they certainly are. The exception is Saffron Burrows’ Susan McAlester, the scientist in charge of the shark program, who wants to use the brain material of sharks to harvest proteins she needs to cure Alzheimer’s disease. Since she broke regulations by genetically engineering the sharks so their brains would grow larger (and therefore generate more of the protein), she is responsible for the events of the film, and goes through a redemption arc of realizing that, although well-intentioned, her actions have cost many lives.
There’s only one problem with this: the arc doesn’t come to a real conclusion. Although Susan admits to the genetic tampering, and subsequently tries and fails to save her research data, she doesn’t actually get to do the clear last step of her arc, which is purposely destroying the final shark as a rejection of her previous choices. Instead, Susan gets unceremoniously killed during the final battle, in a manner that feels completely incongruous with the rest of the scene. If it seems like this moment comes out of nowhere, it literally did. Harlin admitted during an interview with CraveOnline that Susan was originally intended to survive the film and help defeat the last shark, but this was changed a month before release because of a test audience who hated her. Harlin said “in their minds, she was the bad guy and in our minds, she was the heroine and we thought saving her was the key. Basically, we had test cards that said, ‘Kill the bitch.’”
With this information in mind, the wonky way the film wraps is impossible not to see. As the only character who goes through significant change, not rounding out Susan’s arc so she can make amends for her crimes (and also pay off the clear romantic undercurrent of her and Carter’s dynamic, something else the original cut was supposed to do) robs the ending of impact. Deep Blue Sea is a solid movie for 90 percent of its runtime, and then it just sort of limps over the finish line. After the revelation about the reshot ending, fans of the film created a petition for Warner Bros. to release the original cut, which was co-signed by both Harlin and Thomas Jane. Now that we’re at the film’s 25th anniversary, hopefully the powers that be allow for some kind of Director’s Cut to be released, because the film feels incomplete without that last beat.
Even then, Deep Blue Sea is a movie that time has been kind to. It’s no masterpiece, nor is it trying to be, but it’s a deliriously fun monster movie directed with real conviction and attention to detail. It’s exactly the kind of well-crafted cheese that shows that movies of this type don’t have to be shoddy. We hope to see more strong shark movies in the future, but for now, Deep Blue Sea is one well worth coming back to.
Carlos Morales writes novels, articles and Mass Effect essays. You can follow his fixations on Twitter.
