[Note: After re-reading my previous review, I realized there is simply no fun in revealing all the spoilers by making you read the entire synopsis. I promise to keep all spoilers and endings for your viewing eyes only from now on. Enjoy this review, spoiler free!]
I can handle a little psychological thriller (think Hanna or Primal Fear or The Sixth Sense) and even enjoy these kinds of movies, but you can count me out of a horror movie night.
So when I was determined to see The Shallows in theaters, I surprised even myself.
Perhaps it was the lure of gorgeous Blake Lively. Perhaps the intriguing Cast Away type premise. Or perhaps I just felt I needed to witness the Jaws of my generation on the big screen.
In any case, I found myself sitting in a middle row of my local $2.50 theater with a bag full of popcorn, ready and willing to be terrified by a shark.
And terrified I most definitely was.
The movie begins in the most terrifying of ways: A little boy finds a washed up camera that contains footage of several people getting eaten by a shark.
The movie then goes back in time to reveal the events leading up to this discovery. Blake Lively stars as Nancy, a medical school dropout seeking a secret island her mother had once visited. Through a phone call that Nancy has with her father and brother, we learn of the tragic details that has lead Nancy to this discovery, and realize that her character is more complex than at first appeared.
After gearing up for a day of surfing, Nancy takes to the waters, making some new (human) friends along the way. Even though she is warned by her newfound friends to leave the waters well before nightfall, Nancy makes the decision to go back to the waves just once more before she leaves for the night. It is then that she discovers a rather grotesque whale carcass floating in the water. Without thinking, Nancy swims right up to it, and by doing so, swims directly into a shark's feeding ground. While she tries to quickly swim back to shore, Nancy is bit by the shark in her leg, causing her to be unable to swim to shore. She instead takes refuge on a nearby rock as the shark circles around her.
What follows is an intense 60-minute battle of survival as Nancy has to not only fight and outsmart the ever-nearby shark, but also use her medical knowledge of how best to care for her wounded leg.
When first hearing the premise of The Shallows, I was mostly curious to know how the writers could possibly keep the viewer interested for 84 minutes, as the majority of the movie is just a girl on a rock trying to escape a shark. How could that possibly be entertaining for almost an hour and half?
Not only was I interested and on the edge of my seat the entire movie, I left wanting even more.
Writer Anthony Jaswinski did a fantastic job of providing just enough storyline and background to keep writers and English majors satisfied, but also left plenty of time for shark-butt-kicking action. Jaswinski was also smart in his character decisions, such as making Nancy an educated medical student so that it was believable when she doctored her own leg, or having us understand right off the bat that this was a girl who could hold her own so that again it was believable when she made quick, intelligent decisions while fighting the shark. However, Jaswinski also brought in emotional elements, allowing the viewer to see Nancy as a girl who was hurting because of her past and explaining her strong desire to live.
That said, there were a few moments where I questioned Jaswinski's writing choices, as several moments seemed thrown in more for shock value than anything else. For instance, there was an especially disturbing scene where a man gets attacked by the shark, the shark literally cuts him in half, and the man not only lives for several seconds after being cut in half, but one half of him tries to crawl away. While the actual act of the man being attacked is thankfully not shown (the camera instead focuses on Nancy's face as she witnesses this act), we do see him try to crawl away, which is by far the most unsettling and unnecessary scene in the entire film.
There are also a few disturbing scenes dealing with the after effects of Nancy's shark bite, including one scene where she gives herself stitches to try and stop the blood flow, and another scene where she rips her wet suite to make a tourniquet for her leg. Finally, the scene where Nancy finds the whale carcass is also disturbing, as she has to at one point crawl onto the carcass to avoid being eaten by the shark.
The scenes of several individuals dying horrible deaths in the jaws of the shark and the injury scenes with Nancy definitely pushed the PG-13 boundary for me. However, despite these few graphic scenes, the movie was extremely well-written and orchestrated, with numerous scenes filled with interesting camera angles and impressive cinematography, and an excellent score composed by Marco Beltrami.
Directed by Jaume Collet-Serra, The Shallows gets a 7 out of 10 stars from this viewer.
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