Okay, after doing two reviews featuring themes that included the Holocaust and 9/11, plus another mini-review that advocated selflessness in order to save the world, I feel like I need to lighten up a little bit for my next post. So what do we have lined up this time?
*looks at list*
GOD DAMN IT!!!!!
Starring: Deborah Gibson, Lorenzo Lamas, Vic Chao, Sean Lawler
Director: Jack Perez (as Ace Hannah) (yes, I would change my name too)
*Sigh* Shall we begin...?
Oh, good, the cast is getting prepared as well.
The movie starts out in the ocean with a bunch of scientist looking at whales with the help of a helicopter and a submarine. We are then introduced to one of our main characters, Emma MacNeil (singer Deborah Gibson) who is such a scientific genius that she cannot apply the same fingernail polish for both of her hands. Anyway, the whales freak out all the sudden and the helicopter up above crashes into the iceberg, supposedly because of the chaos at hand, but personally think the pilot just wasn't very good. Anyway, the iceberg breaks up, causing two creatures to get unleashed.
In the next scene, it shows a bunch of Japanese on an oil rig. Suddenly, a Giant Octopus attacks and...that's it. No build up or anything; it just does.
Later on, in what is probably the funniest scene in the movie...well...see for yourself:
Okay, where to start...
It's true, real sharks, including Great Whites, have been know to propel their entire bodies into the air in order to catch their prey, but come on, this thing is practically flying through the sky! And why the hell is it going after a plane anyway? It doesn't have anything better to catch in the water? How can it even know that there is a plane up there in the first place?! The whole scenario is just so stupid you can't help but laugh at it!
(Yes, I realize the irony of making fun of a plane crash right after writing a review of United 93. No, I don't feel bad, because that was a serious film about a real-life national tragedy; this is a fictional film about...a Mega Shark and a Giant Octopus. Yes, I feel better about myself too).
A big chunk of this movie is devoted to MacNeil, who later teams up with her old college professor Lamar Sanders (Sean Lawler) and a Japanese scientist named Dr. Seijia Shimada (Vic Chao), as they try and find out about what these creatures are. Ummm....now this is just a guess, but...I think they are a Mega Shark and a Giant Octopus...just throwing it out there...
So why are these creatures roaming around in the present day? Other than the fact that their iceberg was broken up by the whales and the bad pilot and such at the beginning of the movie, so there really isn't any mystery about that at all?! Apparently many creatures such as these have been enclosed in the ice caps for millions of years, but are now being set free because they are all melting, leading to MacNeil to say that this is humans' "comeuppance" for global warming. That's right! Global warming is to blame for all this! So next time you decide not to recycle or buy a hybrid, you deserve to be eaten by a giant prehistoric monster!
SHAME!!!
SO, after learning about this little inconvenient "truth," the team is arrested and placed into the custody of Allan Baxter (Lorenzo Lamas), who has a pony tail despite being in the Navy, is racist, and acts like an overall douchebag. This character bores me. NEXT.
So they agree to help the government to try to stop the monsters, but only if they are not killed because they want to study them. Great, these things are costing thousands of lives and billions of dollars in property damage, but we can't kill them because the hippies want to study them! Well, that plan fails, and the shark makes a giant hole in the Golden Gate Bridge.
Wow, what great CGI effects. They're about as realistic as those original masterpieces made on Syfy.
Well, they finally decide the octopus and shark need to go (guess for the hippies, destroying San Fransisco goes too far) so they come up with a plan to get them to meet up with one another to destroy each other using certain smell senses. How did they come up with this? Because MacNeil and Shimada figured out they are both pretentious snobs who love they ocean a lot, and they have sex in the storage closet when they were suppose to be working on stopping the creatures. Umm...fine, whatever works for you guys!
Anyway, the scientists argue their plan will work because they are sworn enemies that hate each other so much that the destruction of the other is more important than their own survival. That...makes no sense! With the exception of humans, no animal, past or present, acts that way! And even with people there is some sense of a need to survive despite being forced to live with a dreaded enemy! That's how we made it out of the Cold War! Why the hell are these guys any different?!!! And if they really hate each other so much, why did they go their own separate ways after being freed from the ice berg at the beginning of the movie?!!! Stupid, stupid, stupid...!!!
Okay, I'm sick of this, so I am going to tell the rest. Spoilers ahead...not that you care. The teams encounters a bunch of problems trying to get the octopus and shark to meet each other. Most of it is filler, but there is one part here that stands out: while being chased by the shark, the guy in charge of directing the submarine (I don't know the actor's name, fortunately for him) freaks out and points a gun at the commanding officer (Dean Kreyling), saying he was going to get them all killed.
Oh, I'm sorry, this isn't an actual scene. I think this is just director Jack Perez during the time when he was talking to the actors about starring in this film.
Umm...okay, movie, you did a nice job of ripping off "Crimson Tide," but I'm afraid you have a few holes in this little scenario. First of all, why does that guy have a gun on him in the first place? Isn't that against protocol? Second, he is upset because his C.O. is going to force them to crash the sub, but everyone would otherwise get killed by the shark. So what difference does it make? Aren't you kind of dead anyway? At least with him in charge you have a shot. Third, if you aren't steering the sub and no one replaces you, aren't you kind of increasing your chances of dying?! The answer to all this: it ends in less than five minutes so it doesn't really matter. SUPER!
Okay, I'm getting tired of this. Let's wrap this up...,
When the creatures finally meet, they battle each other for about five minutes. It's called Mega Shark Versus Giant Octopus, and they fight for five minutes during the whole film, with most of the shots having such bad lighting that they end up looking like this:
Way to destroy my expectations, movie! I was really hoping for...well, not much, but I am still pissed off!
Well, just as the brilliant scientists predicted, they then kill each other off as planned and sink to the bottom of the ocean. The group celebrates and then set out on another adventure (they planned to make a sequel to this?!). The last scene shows the creatures continuing to fall into the depths of the sea, dead as can be...
...OR ARE THEY?!
Yes. Yes they are. So that last shot was entirely pointless. Symbolic of the whole movie, perhaps?!
This movie...is pretty much what you expect it to be based on the title alone. The acting is mediocre at best, the characters are bland, the CGI effects are horrible, the plot makes no sense and is given a half-assed environmental message to make it seem deep (sorry, I guess that technically counts as a pun), and worst of all, it's just plain boring. The monster movies of the 1950s featuring Godzilla and others were by no means great pieces of cinema, but they were at least kind of fun and had some creativity put into them. And when they had an anti-nuclear war or other environmental message, they usually tried to be subtle about it by working it neatly into the plot. By comparison, this movie just seems soulless and more like an excuse to make a cheap buck than trying to entertain anyone.
This goes without saying, but I do not recommend it!
I do not own the copyrights to these images or links; they are being used for entertainment purposes only. Please do not sue me.
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