I’m tired of these mother fucken sharks in this motherfucker underwater research facility! The most memorable scene from this film, back when I saw it in the 20th century, was the scene where Samuel L Jackson’s character meets his demise. Do I have to worry about spoilers for a film that’s nearly 30 years old? Even if I say he dies, it’s not the ruination of the scene as it is so wonderfully put together because it’s the manner that matters.
Deep Blue Sea comes from that most wonderful year of film when the heart and soul and budget were poured into almost every production. Although we can look back now and say that the CGI and VFX may not have been that great, back then the suspension of belief was enough to see through those technicalities. The first person perspective from the film’s villainous antagonists were used to great effect. And the fact is that the believability comes more from the cast of characters and the actors’ fantastic acting, their belief in the project. Thomas Jane plays a wonderful leading protagonist.
We may not call it a masterpiece but it does hold a certain amount of fun and the passion for the project that the team had can be seen throughout the production. Even LL Cool J’s religious character with his ornithological companion is buyable within the context of this claustrophobic action. If Jaws and Sphere had a baby, this film would be it. And it’s a healthy bouncing baby that holds its own in the echelons of the motion picture medium. There are far worse films made today with far bigger budgets and far less belief from the crews involved.
I have a friend who worked on the sequel, but to be honest I’ve never watched that one. However, on any given night when I’m looking through the channels of what’s on TV (because that’s far more natural than the on-demand choosing that lasts an hour of searching for half an hour of entertainment) if I come across Deep Blue Sea, I won’t shy away from giving it another hour and a half or so of my day and life, because let’s be real, it’s an honest romp in the world of action/thriller/adventure. Back when it came out and I was a much younger ape, this film brought with it the kind of tension that hadn’t been experienced since Jurassic Park or the original shark movie Jaws.
1999 was such a good year for film because it didn’t matter what you were making, you had to put real work (“love made visible” as Khalil Gibran puts it) into the project. Whether you were the writer, producer, director, actor or cine, you had to harness your passion and belief to build it and that made it good, even if it was bad.Even now, decades later, Deep Blue Sea remains a joy to watch. The tension, the claustrophobia, the oddball characters, and yes, the sharks, all work together to remind you that filmmaking is meant to be fun, exciting, and full of heart. Watching Samuel L Jackson go out in style, seeing the quirks of LL Cool J’s character, and simply enjoying a film that takes its premise seriously but never itself too seriously, is enough to make me smile like the young ape I once was, and still am at heart. If you haven’t revisited it in a while, it’s worth dropping in and letting the water close around you, figuratively, of course.
