Written by Old Bluffer 5th Dec 2006

The premise of Deep Blue Sea is simple. It is The Poseidon Adventure with Genetically Engineered Super Sharks added to Increase the Peril.

The superb Stellan Skarsgård plays Professor Whitlock, a scientific Boffin who creates the super sharks.

The motivation for this satanic dabbling with God's creatures is purportedly to treat Alzheimers Disease. The reasoning being that sharks never suffer brain disease, therefore if science is used to expand their brains, that should help find a cure. That the sharks more than double in size as a result is never explained, but it is of course taken as a given that the end result will be vicious killers that take out most of the cast.

I say "satanic dabbling", as there is an incredibly strong far-right Christian political bias to this movie, which luckily is so unsubtly done that it can be easily laughed at. The plot boils down to "Science Bad. Sharks Exciting. God Good." Once this moral agenda is recognised, it becomes a simple matter of waiting for the scientists to get eaten by their own heinous creations (and as a corollary, watching the token Man of God archetype escape certain death numerous times, simply because he wears a large crucifix).

A typical piece of dialogue would therefore be:

Russell Franklin : "What in God's creation?!"
Professor Whitlock (smugly) : "Oh, not His. Ours."

So, damned by his own forked tongue, the prof admits to the audience his work is ungodly, and he will soon be consigned to hell by way of a some Very Sharp Teeth.

When this comes, it is nicely drawn out and agonising. First of all, the biggest shark, "Gen-2" has to be captured by the film's Animal Hunter Archetype, Carter "total superhuman stud" Blake.
Safely drugged, Gen-2 has an automobile dipstick inserted into her head, and some brain juice is extracted. We are then treated to a suspenseful insight into the world of Molecular Biology, as liquid shark brain is dripped over a sample of damaged human brain tissue, which suddenly sparks into life (literally, the jagged bolts of electricity between neurons are helpfullly shown on a big screen for us).

This is proof that their work could help cure a horrific disease that causes misery around the planet for millions of individuals, but because of the Moral Agenda, all it signifies in this film is that Whitlock is about to be punished by the righteous anger of God's Shark.
To make this nice and easy he walks right next to the mouth of the doped up Gen-2 and makes some glib comment. This was all Gen-2 was waiting for, and with a swift chomp she bites his arm off.

Whitlock lights up (over on the left) and inhales his last puff of tobacco...


You have to love how sharks express their views on passive smoking!

All kinds of mayhem ensues, during which Gen-2 escapes and Whitlock is dragged off for medical attention.
[En route, one of the doctors screams "He's hemorrhaging!" - but sadly the Abusive Parrot that lives in the kitchen doesn't squawk out "Well f***ing Duh!"]


The prof looks as if he is safe, but God has more righteous anger in store of him!

So, Whitlock is severely wounded, but once strapped into a stretcher and heli-lifted to safety it seems that he needn't necessarily die. Mother Nature won't let him escape his fate though, and a storm of biblical proportions is centred directly over the ocean laboratory. This means that the winch fails at a critical point, and the maimed professor is dropped into the sea like a juicy maggot being cast from a fishing rod.

Gen-2 takes the bait, and both the stretchered scientist and the helicopter are dragged at speed by her powerful swimming. The chopper isn't really designed to be towed and soon crashes into the base's fuel depot, resulting in a predictable series of Enormous Explosions.


These grabs don't do justice to the destruction wrought by this helicopter - it is like World War 3 in fact.

Meanwhile, Whitlock is still not dead, and Gen-2 has other plans for him...

She dives down with the stretcher still between her jaws, and taunts the rest of the researchers by parading their leader in front of one of the hardened underwater viewing windows. She then demonstrates a capable knowledge of tool use and Newton's laws, by employing Whitlock as a battering ram. His stretcher is hurtled into the window, and the last anyone sees of him is his look of agony as he crunches into the toughened glass.


One assumes Whitlock is by this point thinking 'why me?' and shortly afterwards thinking 'oh yes, that's right, damn my fascination with genetics!'


The scientists gaze gormlessly as 100 zillion tonnes of water starts cracking their underwater window.

The window eventually shatters (there is a long delay before this happens, allowing the other characters time to amble away to safety) and the first section of the underwater base is flooded, which is later revealed to be the shark's ultimate strategy...