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“The Shallows” is a thriller that runs for 87 minutes and for the most part showcases a lagoon where an injured surfer battles a shark. There isn’t much story apart from that, and what little the movie tries to create does not aid in making it any better. The situations are primal and terrifying; However, the film is set in a stretch of shore-bordered water around a kilometer wide which adds extra suspense. If the best ever film is “Mad Max: Fury Road”, then I would say the film is closer to a pure action what Anthony Jaswinski and Jaume Collet-Serra (“Non-Stop,” “Run All Night”) created. With that being said, Blake Lively, the star, is used often, much like how “Fury Road” director George Miller utilized his actors; as an object of kinetic sculpture.
One can say “The Shallows” is a survival thriller, a woman versus nature, with a nature being represented most of the time with a shark that is the size of a bus. The immense slate-grey beast greatly resembles the great white that destroyed the Orca in the first “Jaws,” however Lively’s character was far more agile as she could leap into the air like a porpoise and twist to snatch prey in hard-to-reach places.
Nancy, a medical school dropout, finds herself greeting a formidable shark at a beach in Mexico that was adored by her mother before she lost her battle with cancer.
An appreciation for Nancy’s dilemma is equally informed by expository dialogue and Dennis Weaver’s internal monologues that were seamlessly integrated into Spielberg’s first major movie, “Duel.” To appreciate Nancy’s plight, it is worth noting that he was never an important figure. This is a tough film on problem solving and endurance. It is a film that has a lot of questions as the answers are projected so elaborately. The euphoric visuals fused with sound effects and the heart-stopping music composed by Marco Beltrami leave little to be answered. So, when Nancy speaks endearingly and says, “I’ve got you figured out” or “forty meters”, it almost sounds desperate with disbelief in the film’s great intentions.
Now we get to Lively and the hyper-focused, action-lead performances that is nothing short of an athletic feat. There are a few supporting roles, the majority of whom become shark bait, but at the end of the day The Shallows is a solo act. It puts her on a jagged rocky pedestal and worships her. During the night scenes, she wears a bikini so radiantly orange that it seems to refract moonlight. Not since the 90s and the gold star era of Kevin Costner has an actor’s posterior been so keenly examined. With a double filling during the most dangerous bits, Lively does a lot of her own surfing. She contains so much ferocity and grace within her – she swimmers through the chop, screams, cries, dives into murky depths, and runs and climbs. Like Tom Hanks in Cast Away, she has a “buddy”, a nonhuman she seagull named Steven. It is cornball and a lot of this movie is cornball, but the seagull is so lovable it’s hard to imagine it lasting through the end credits.
Awhile later, you understand Nancy’s state of health with such depth that you can guess what her hospital admission forms will look like, and you get to know the beach so well that you could produce a map indicating the principal sites of interest: the coastline, a buoy, two outcropping of rock, and a decaying whale carcass that is floating out much farther. The ocean is filled with creatures who could care less whether any of the captured stars survive, and sharks are not the only danger. Nancy is always in close proximity—the camera is sometimes quite literally shoved in her face and like Spielberg, the director brings us bits of the shark: the dorsal fin over here, some flash-cuts over to the sharp teeth, and a shadow moving quickly between the camera and Nancy’s legs as she kicks.
The film “The Shallows” has not quite grasped how every single one of its arguments can be successfully conveyed with the utmost simplicity. Unlike recommending a woman-centered version of Robert Redford’s “All is Lost”, that treated an old man’s boating accident like it was a lost chapter of the Odyssey. It is clever in the absence of it’s exposition and inspirational backstory. Toward the ending of the film, there is one shot that I feel would work excellently in bringing everything to a close. The bad news is that the shot does one simply drown it out. The worse part is that destroying it capitalizes on the movie’s most down parts. Lively’s skill demands greater considerations than the sequence of effects and editing.
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