Deep Blue Sea 3 (2020)
Deadlier Than Ever.
Just ahead of everyone’s favorite aquatic calendar week I return with the promised movie from the deep. The one not expected, born from one that wasn’t necessary. The one looking to regain the respect for a franchise that fell over in the mud during a critical play and caused dozens to crash. Yes, it’s blue, it’s deep, it’s the sea - tonight we check out Deep Blue Sea 3 and ask the age old question - can we recover from the nonsense of the last one?
For the first time in the history of DBS, we don’t actually directly have scientists experimenting on sharks. Instead, our story focuses on a conservationist of sort, a scientist and her cadre of different walks taking up residence on a sinking island to study the undersea life - in particular sharks - and set up a new AI aided sensor system to better study the ecosystem there-in. Of course, things take a sharp turn when it turns out there just so happens to be three bull sharks on the loose - ones that might have just so happened to get away from a certain sunken facility - that are here to pitch the land lovers an age old question: whose the real monsters? When you have smart meat-eating fish in the water, who can find the time for traitorous money-grubbing man? Well, this movie can, that’s who!
It’s enough there that it’s two important things: A) it’s different, and B) it sets up all the antics without feeling horribly forced. That first bullet point is an important one in the list - DBS 2 strayed a little too close to the original, which only served to point out how much you should have just been watching the original because the biggest addition was not-great looking piranha-like baby sharks. Here, we have a different location, a mix of topside and underwater scenes, and mostly adult sharks that can look not great. Of course, we get plenty of stuff we are already accustomed to from the series - ethics, morals, sharks eating the crap out of people and at least one scene of a shark hitting an underwater window. What we get in addition, however, is plenty of lovely underwater scenery shots that still service the movie’s story in some way or another, and an escape from the super-claustrophobic underwater facility setting of the last two. It’s sharks, but sharks in their more natural environment.
Character are surprisingly good here. I mean, they don’t necessarily feel like they are super well written or fully developed, but the good guys are all likeable with the time you spend with them. It never makes the character that would normally be really annoying have the chance to get too annoying, usually falling just past endearing but well short of “just die already.” The bad guy group are a wasted bunch - only two getting any decent amount of time to so much as talk to even try and have a personality, and then you get stuck mostly to the stock “greedy doing their job” and “confused idealistic scientist type.” Look, it’s not going to be so much you write home about the characters, but you at least might find yourself wanting some of them to not die, and wanting others to get munched on in a brutal way - which really is what you want out of this. More so than the characters on an individual stand point, I find the chemistry between the characters is the real selling point.
Most of the main party.
That’s probably where things transcend “character as written” and dumps a lot of props on the actors themselves. They really hit their parts, regardless of how narrow the scope might be, without any real hiccups. It’s not going to avoid stereotypes and totally foreseeable futures, but you can enjoy most of them and they feel rather human. The sharks, on the flip side of it, also have a little personality, but largely you’ll find the one Great White that’s not even really a big part of the story to have far more character than any of the smart-enhanced Bulls swimming about. I would argue that the movie still doesn’t quite hit the levels of character as the first - you never find yourself rooting for someone as hard as Chef from the first, or downright seething at the single-track non-empathetic mind of the first movies main lady scientist. The movie does try the whole “shock during a speech” thing - but let’s be honest, after you’ve seen the first one’s it never carries the same unexpected nature.
So how does it all look though? Surprisingly good. For whatever reason, the movie - being one released in 2020 - isn’t available in 4k for digital rental or purchase in any of the spots I looked, but even then it looked quite fine on my setup. Now, every now and then the sharks look pretty toss - but for the most part there’s legitimate “I think that’s a real shark” moments all over this movie. When it comes to other stuff - like the violent kind - it’s pretty even keel across the movie. Cuts look like cuts, watery blood looks like red water, and the occasional corpse looks fine. Some of it can be a bit graphic - particularly the dude that’s only half a dude - but for the most part it doesn’t go to insane and in your face about the violence. Still, it is something to note that you are watching a movie about effectively killer sharks so you should expect some violence in it.
Audio works fine. Balance is all well done. Underwater sounds like underwater, and when people talk underwater via radios and the likes it sounds suitably like you’d imagine. There really isn’t any stand out soundtrack moments for me, but they all do a good job of just being there as background audio and contributing to the mood. There’s a few really tense moments than even I was getting the experience off, and it’s quite the relief when those moments finally pass - which is sort of impressive that it had such an effect and I wonder how much of that is just having the last sequel in my head and my expectation being that much lowered to make it so effective. Still, it’s got some good tense moments, a jump scare or two in there - although honestly at this point I feel all of the shock moments are predictable, and maybe that’s the real reason the tense moments worked so well.
It’s a boy shark.
Look, if we can just ignore the second movie, this franchise is nothin’ but bangers. You entertainingly don’t need to have seen the first or second movies to watch this and not be lost - in part thanks to a recap one of the characters does via hear-say, but also simply because the only thing the past movies do is explain how the existence of the movie’s threat came to be, not why it’s currently a threat. You want a good shark movie, well dare I say it, this one’s actually darn good. If you want a better movie, I’d still say check out the first one - but this one rightfully earns itself a little place in the cage of my shark collection.