The film didn’t really work, ultimately, although the set-up was terrifying. You go scuba diving and the boat leaves you behind? What would you do? How would you get out of that situation? How would you survive?<\/p>\n
Don’t read this if you haven’t seen it yet and want to – MAJOR spoilers:<\/p>\n
\nThey both die. First he dies – he gets bit on the leg by a shark, and eventually dies from loss of blood. She feels his pulse, realizes he’s dead, and lets him go. His body drifts off, and then you see a tug on it from below. Then another tug. And then it is gone. Eaten by the sharks.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile – at shore – it has been discovered they are missing. So you see helicopters starting, and a shitload of boats head out – to look for them. You get the sense: Okay, well he’s a goner, but maybe they’ll find her? Maybe there’s some hope.<\/p>\n
Cut back to her. She is now alone. You can see the shark fins pretty much circling her now. She gets glimpses of their massive bodies beneath the water, circling, circling. (It’s a terrible terrible image. It taps into that whole primal fear thing that Spielberg expressed so perfectly in Jaws<\/i>: being afraid of what is down there that we can’t see<\/i>).<\/p>\n
Even though we the audience knows that there are helicopters looking for her now, she doesn’t. So she takes off her scuba mask, the camera pulls back a bit, and she basically disappears from sight. She has not been pulled down by the sharks, no – she swims down to meet them.<\/p>\n
A horrible image.<\/p>\n
But the film left me a bit tepid. <\/p>\n
In my opinion, the film would have had a greater impact if she had actually been spotted by the helicopter and picked up. Not because that would mean it’s a happy ending – far from it. After all, if you go through something like that, you would never be the same again. And her boyfriend’s dead – she watched him get eaten. But I still think that THAT would have been a better ending. Would have let me feel, more, the tragedy and awfulness of it all. A sense that no way could you ever “go back to normal” after something like that.<\/p>\n
On a side note, though:<\/p>\n
The night-time scene, when there’s a lightning storm, and you only see the two of them intermittently, clutching each other for dear life, and in the flashes of lightning you get brief glimpses of the shark fins all around them in the water – is horrifying.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The film didn’t really work, ultimately, although the set-up was terrifying. You go scuba diving and the boat leaves you behind? What would you do? How would you get out of that situation? How would you survive? Don’t read this … Continue reading