Summer is the perfect season for escapist B-movies about man-eating killer sharks, the counterpart to the beach read paperback. The famous marine predators have become a Hollywood industry unto itself. Just add “shark” to a pitch and you got yourself a movie or at least an Asylum movie (the studio behind Sharknado and Sharktopus). 47 Meters Down was originally titled In the Deep and was scheduled to come out on DVD in 2016. It’s low budget, light on stars, and driven by its concept. It’s also not good enough to be good and not bad enough to be enjoyable. It just is.
Lisa (Mandy Moore) and Kate (Claire Holt) are sisters vacationing in Mexico. Kate is wild, Lisa is a bore, and they meet some cute local boys. They all agree to go swimming with sharks in a giant metal cage that will lower five meters into the water. Captain Taylor (Matthew Modine, you bet it is) takes the gang out to the ocean and dumps chum and blood in the water to attract the great whites. The ladies are in the cage, the shark has made itself known, and that’s when the cable snaps. The cage descends the titular 47 meters (approximately 150 feet) onto the ocean floor. The sisters are stranded, trapped with limited oxygen, and there’s a hungry shark waiting to strike.
47 Meters Down has many challenges to overcome and it ultimately falters under the pressure. For starters, having a movie take place almost entirely on the bottom of the ocean provides filming and storytelling limitations. The suspense sequences are going to be restricted because there’s only so much variance that can happen. The geography is also rather murky and it’s very dark in presentation, which means that it’s hard to fully understand what’s happening around the characters. This detracts from implementing suspense sequences that need multiple points of action. Take a sequence in The Shallows, where Blake Lively has to time the shark’s pattern to determine how many seconds she has to retrieve a valuable item in the water. She plunges into the water with the ticking clock letting us know about the impending window of danger. That’s a good arrangement. An audience appreciates being in on the suspense and that requires clarity. 47 Meters Down supplies some immediate mini-goals that feel organic to the situation but it can’t last long. The immediate need to try to get out of the cage supplies a cleanly understood series of goals. They need to remove the debris on top of the cage’s entrance. Before that, they need to slip out of the cage. Before that, they need to remove their mask in order to fit through the bars, which provides another even more pressing danger.
Beyond that promising early challenge, 47 Meters Down essentially becomes a contained thriller with a boogeyman repeating the same routine. Once this realization settled in I started losing significant interest. Because of the overall murkiness of geography, we’re stuck with repetitions of jump scares. A few of them are pretty good as far as jump scares go, but without anything else to subsist upon the tension fades precipitously. It’s the aquatic equivalent of a big scary monster jumping out of the dark and yelling, “Boo.” In moderation and with effective setup, this is fine. When it’s all you have then diminishing returns is to be expected. 47 Meters Down supplies cinematic “fetch quests” for the characters to leave the relatively safe confines of their station, but the larger particulars are never fleshed out efficiently. Much of the second act involves a character having to leave the cage to grab something and worrying about the shark appearing out of nowhere. The hypothetical omnipresent nature of the killer shark is meant to foster a claustrophobic sense of anxiety. Instead, it achieves the opposite. I grew bored wondering what random moment the shark was going to rear its CGI head.
The third act goes into a more mainstream action-survival mode and supplies the heroics that mass audiences have come to expect. The problem is that 47 Meters Down tries to have it all and actually loses everything in a misapplied series of endings. This is one of the most egregious cases since A.I. of a movie not knowing when to call it quits. Kate and Lisa are given the bare minimum of backstory before being thrown to the sharks (Lisa just got dumped for not being spontaneous enough so… swimming with sharks… to prove the ex wrong… that she still wants back?). They’re mostly annoying and whiny, and perhaps I have a heart of stone but I was indifferent to whether or not they became shark food.
Then when the third act rolls around (spoilers to follow), Lisa decides to take charge and becomes an action movie heroine. She’s active and rescues her injured sister, swims to the surface, and even kills a shark after it chomps down on her leg twice. It feels like a climactic finish and serves at least as a modest endpoint for Lisa’s character arc, going from meek to assertive. Then Lisa notices the blood floating from her cut hand and it’s revealed, twist, that everything relating to the escape was a hallucination caused by nitrogen narcosis. Captain Taylor was worried that switching to another oxygen tank would be too much for the ladies and produce strange behavior and hallucinations. If the movie decided to end at this point then it could have worked. However, 47 Meters Down unwisely keeps moving for a needless resolution that left me staggered. Lisa is rescued by faceless Coast Guard diving members and brought to the surface. That’s it. Dear reader, what’s the point of having a dark twist ending if she’s just rescued immediately? For that matter, why even have the twist then if she’s going to be rescued? Why not just keep the earlier sequence where she gets her heroic moments of action? The filmmakers replaced an ending where the protagonist is active with one where she is passive. That’s not a satisfying decision and it erases Lisa’s entire agency as a character (end spoilers).
There’s also a massive plot hole in how exactly are Kate and Lisa able to hear anything? Astute audience members will notice that there is no listening device in either woman’s pair of ears and their scuba helmets cut off their ears. How can they hear anything? A simple fix would have been just literally having a speaker in their ear like local newscasters. This way the illusion would not be broken and it would also allow the filmmakers to directly communicate with their actors while underwater. It’s win-win. Maybe they can introduce in-ear speakers for the sequel, 48 Meters Down.
If you need to beat the heat this summer for 90 minutes, you could do worse than venturing into the shark-infested waters of 47 Meters Down. The visuals are pretty grimy and indistinct but it does offer the occasional thrill, though to stark diminishing returns. I would advise everyone to instead just watch The Shallows, a superior shark thriller with natural style, tautly wound suspense sequences, and the luxury of an emotionally compelling character arc to go along with the benefits of a sun-kissed Blake Lively. If anything, this feels like the Asylum knockoff on The Shallows. Audiences with a deep abiding fear of the water or killer sharks may find enough entertainment to be had, but for everyone else, 47 Meters Down is an exercise in treading water.
Nate’s Grade: C
This review originally ran on Nate’s own review site Nathanzoebl. Check it out for hundreds of excellent reviews!