Pardon our dust! We just migrated to a new host and platform, and we're still doing some fine-tuning. Broken images, URLs, etc. will be par for the course.
THRASH */**** starring Phoebe Dynevor, Whitney Peak, Djimon Hounsou written and directed by Tommy Wirkola
DEEP WATER ***/**** starring Aaron Eckhart, Angus Sampson, Molly Belle Wright, Ben Kingsley screenplay by Pete Bridges and Shayne Armstrong & SP Krause and Damien Power directed by Renny Harlin
by Walter Chaw If the first stories we told each other in those caves were warnings–horror by any other name–then it’s a good idea to wonder what kind of warning our horror entertainments are desperate to communicate. Since they’re expressions of the subconscious surfing the (literally) bleeding edge of the zeitgeist, they must reveal something about our common fears. Why was The Exorcist a box-office phenomenon? Or The Blair Witch Project? We think it’s our choice, what we make and what we want to see, but it’s not. Not entirely. When we speak of the scale of time in human evolution, we are after all just a flicker of an eyeblink removed from hunting and gathering in a primal night. That being said, monsters in movies are reliable bellwethers indicating a specific pollutant in the collective swamp, and the classic ones resurface when the environment is most conducive to their survival. The latest Frankenstein riffs reframe Mary Shelley’s story as the first salvo against the hubris-driven creation of artificial intelligences. Recent adaptations of Dracula couldn’t help but be allegories for evil foreigners buying up real estate and perving on our women. Now, a couple of new films join last year’s Dangerous Animals and the deathless Sharknado franchise in asking the question: why have so many shark movies arrived in a toothy school all at once?
I suspect people who like watching movies for more than their soporific, tranquillizing properties will one day, from their stilts-and-bubble homes in the New York archipelago, identify Tommy Wirkola’s Thrash as a climate-change parable not unlike its sister film, Alexandre Aja’s obviously superior Crawl. That movie took place in Florida and dealt with alligators, whereas this one deposits us in backwater Annieville, SC, which has fallen in the path of Cat 5 Hurricane Henry, the eighth or ninth “once in a century” storm to hit the United States in the last decade or so. The catastrophic flooding brings with it…sharks. You heard me. Mother. Fucking. Sharks. I am probably more afraid of sharks than I am of anything, and, friends, I live in a country run by the guys who kill Piggy in Lord of the Flies.
So sharks come to harass marine scientist Dr. Edwards (Djimon Hounsou, squandered for years by Hollywood but finally cashing in on geezer teasers), who provides helpful exposition like, “That shark who’s eating everybody is probably a bull shark, common misconception;” three siblings with an abusive inbred country yokel Billy (Matt Nable) as their foster father; and Lisa (Phoebe Dynevor), a hot pregnant lady trapped inside her sensible car by a tree branch as the river rises. I know it’s the ocean, not a river, but alliteration adds drama and character to one’s writing, if not necessarily every time, or even this time. Billy, by the way, has a secret cooler in his garage full of meat that he’s not sharing with his orphan charges, in case you’re wondering if Anton Chekhov is currently spinning in his grave.
Lots of unforgivable things happen in Thrash, none of which involve the sharks, who are righteous in their appetite. I’m thinking more of stuff like how Dakota (Whitney Peak), a Black woman with agoraphobia, becomes Lisa’s Bagger Vance–if Bagger Vance were a doula and Rannulph Junuh were a hot pregnant girl stuck in a flooding car surrounded by sharks. That’s an awkward power dynamic masquerading as representation, and there’s a lot to say about it, but why bother? Go wild. Choose to see it or choose to ignore it; I’m not your mom. I do lament the missed opportunity to pay “homage” to Apocalypto by home-birthing Lisa’s future Masters of the Universe directly into shark-infested waters. Symbolism! Sorry you won’t be able to afford a mortgage in your lifetime, but welcome to life! Why isn’t Lisa’s generation having more babies, anthropologists?
Meanwhile, our heroic orphans use the secret garage meat to lure some sharks into a Jaws homage just before they construct an IED in a smash-cut Evil Dead homage. I use the word “homage,” though there may be another term for it. It’ll come to me. All of these homages to more energetic, more cleverly constructed, certainly more thoughtful films tend to underscore that Thrash is as limp and impotent as Elvis’s junk in Bubba Ho-Tep. That doesn’t mean Thrash isn’t a valuable addition to a list someone will one day compile for their PowerPoint lecture to freshman media students covering what we were talking about as a people in the last hours before the ice caps finished melting and we started tattooing maps to Dryland on the backs of little dreadlocked white girls. See, that’s how you homage.
Better by 20,000 leagues is Renny Harlin’s Deep Water, a spiritual sequel to his own sneaky-smart shark movie Deep Blue Sea, featuring a prickly throwback-to-Sexy Beast-era Ben Kingsley as a wizened, bitter airline captain for Hitchcock-coded “Northwest Airlines.” Or Hamlet coded, doesn’t matter. Captain Rich’s second-in-command is–wait a minute, it’s “Northeastern” Airlines, isn’t it? Which now tempts me to make a Stephen King Maine-r joke about a spell of bad weather or some shit. Captain Rich’s second-in-command is gentle Ben (Aaron Eckhart), a too-old-to-be-second-fiddle second fiddle who obviously has a tragic backstory explaining why he’s still taking orders from Dick over there. Among the passengers on their transpacific flight is a lovable mixed, non-traditional family, the hot parents of which will try to join the mile-high club at the worst possible moment. There’s also a Chinese esports team led by plucky Lilly (Rose Zhao) and Sam (Yu Xiaolei, I think; the press notes are astonishingly unhelpful), who loves Lilly but is bound by social restrictions not to ask her out on a date, and an old woman (Kate Fitzpatrick) fulfilling the Shelley Winters archetype, reminding me that Shelley managed to drown in at least 40 of her movies.
Deep Water is essentially an ocean-bound The Towering Inferno with sharks instead of flames. And rather than faulty sprinklers or an ill-considered building plan, it’s largely about how Mainland China owns the United States as its largest debt holder by far. Thus, when the People’s Republic produces Western blockbusters, they are accidentally disquieting microcosms of our indentured relationship with them. More disquieting is that Gene Simmons is the face of Deep Water‘s American production team, giving junket interviews like a Hall of Presidents animatronic representation of what would instantly be our second-vilest, most repulsive POTUS.
I mention the Chinese because Chinese stars are inserted into the cast, while a Chinese fishing vessel full of kind Chinese fishermen is the Chinese ex machina of Deep Water. Which is fine by me. The notion of China as a national landlord, holding our damage deposit and the next trillion years of Next Month’s Rent in limbo, is thrillingly ridiculous in the way that only actual catastrophes can be. Deep water, indeed, amiright? Anyway, Ben and Dick’s plane crashes and breaks apart on a reef, Kingsley contributes another photograph-clutching exit to his in memoriam Oscar reel, and then the sharks show up. Are the kills good? Sure! Is it scary? Not really–you have to care to be scared–but the message that we’re all members of a global community is timely, given recent efforts to disband NATO and scofflaw determinations by the Hague.
Good plane crash, by the way. Imagine the Fight Club crash, but five minutes long. Beneath the spectacle, Deep Water has the gumption to suggest the only way we’re going to get out of these shark-infested waters is if the Black and Asian communities manage to rekindle the blazing love affair they had with one another during the Civil Rights era. Back before the powers that be engineered the myth of the model minority to drive a wedge between us, both popularly and within our ranks. Now we have Asian-Americans campaigning against diversity, which is a little like the Japanese signing a treaty with genocidal white bigots. What do sharks represent in our current spate of shark flicks? (Remembering that Jaws was a metaphor for capitalism maturing into its late stages.) Well, sharks are the rich, of course. Fuck them guys. Does this mean that Deep Water doesn’t objectify Chinese women as fetish objects? Er, no, but at least nobody’s pregnant and ordering around a troubled Black doula she’s forced into compliance. Let’s Oliver Hardy shake on that and call it progress. Homage! Nailed it.
