Last Updated on October 12, 2021
In back-to-back summers, shark thrillers featuring just one or two characters being trapped in a bad situation with hungry fish enjoyed solid success at the box office. Those films were Jaume Collet-Serra's THE SHALLOWS, released in 2016, and Johannes Roberts' 47 METERS DOWN, which very nearly got a straight-to-video release in 2016 before being re-scheduled for a theatrical release in 2017. That change of release plans turned out so well that a Roberts-directed sequel, 47 METERS DOWN: UNCAGED, will be reaching theatres this weekend. In anticipation of that sequel, we decided to take a look back at both THE SHALLOWS and 47 METERS DOWN and see which of these small scale shark thrillers will come out the victor when they Face-Off.
When Nancy Adams' mother found out she was pregnant, she celebrated by doing some surfing at a secluded, “secret” beach in Mexico. Twenty-five years later, Nancy's mother has passed away after a battle with cancer and Nancy has made the journey to that hidden beach to do some surfing of her own while trying to figure out what to do with her life from this point on. After watching what her mother went through, she is considering dropping out of medical school because she has seen how hopeless things can be. This is an interesting, emotionally engaging story writer Anthony Jaswinski crafted for the film's lead, much better than following someone who's just on vacation.
Recently dumped by her bored live-in boyfriend, Lisa has joined her sister Kate on a beach vacation in Mexico in an attempt to prove to her ex that she can be fun and have fun… So every bad thing that happens to Lisa in this movie, she's enduring simply because she wanted to take pictures of herself being adventurous to post online in hopes that it will make her ex want to come running back to her. Kudos to writers Johannes Roberts and Ernest Riera for wanting to add in some sort of emotional element here, but Lisa's motivation comes off as sad and ridiculous. Nobody watching this movie is going to be rooting for her to successfully make her ex wish he was on this trip with her. In the end, it doesn't really matter.
Nancy Adams is going through a tough time, and actress Blake Lively does a good job of conveying her troubled emotional state in the scenes dealing with the loss of her mother and the uncertainty of her future. Once Nancy finds herself being targeted by a shark just a couple hundred feet from the beach, she proves to be an intelligent, resourceful heroine who tries everything she can think of to get out of this situation. She's not only smart enough to time how long it takes the shark to swim from place to place, but also has enough medical training to patch herself up when she gets wounded. (And help an injured seagull as well.)
Played by Mandy Moore and Claire Holt, Lisa and Kate are characters I wouldn't be very interested in spending time watching if they didn't get dropped into some kind of terrifying scenario – like being trapped in shark-infested waters after the shark cage they're in drops to the bottom of the ocean. On the surface they're kind of vapid. Once they're underwater it's easy to side with them as they try to figure out how to get back to the surface without getting eaten or getting the bends. Party girl Kate turns out to be knowledgeable about underwater survival and steps up to a surprising degree, while the “boring” Lisa is more helpless.
THE SHALLOWS features the classic shark thriller version of a great white shark, the type of voraciously hungry shark we've been seeing swim across the screen on a regular basis ever since the release of JAWS. This thing can eat three whole people, snack on some bites of whale carcass, and still be eager to devour Nancy, all within the same day. This shark is determined to eat any human who enters the water at this beach, no matter how many people that may be.
There are a lot of sharks swimming around in the water above Lisa and Kate, providing the constant threat that the women might get munched on if they try swimming away from the sunken cage. The sharks aren't constantly on the attack, but they are the reason why the women are forced to stay underwater for so long that they're in danger of running out of oxygen. There are stretches of the movie where the sharks are not the primary concern, replaced by the fear of drowning.
Nancy spends a lot of time hanging out on a small rock island while the shark swims circles around her, but Jaswinski and director Jaume Collet-Serra make sure the situation never gets dull. The film moves quickly, and there's never a point where too many minutes go by before Nancy makes an attempt to get out of this predicament. And if she's not having a near miss with the shark, someone else is getting munched on. If watching sharks creeps you out, THE SHALLOWS will likely put you on the edge of your seat.
Thanks to JAWS, I am deeply afraid of sharks and had recurring nightmares about them throughout my childhood. But as scary as the idea of being attacked by sharks while swimming on the surface of the water or in the shallows is, the idea of being in a cage that has been dropped to the bottom of the ocean, running out of oxygen while sharks circle above, is terrifying on a whole other level. This isn't a situation I would ever be in, but I find it very unnerving to watch the characters of 47 METERS DOWN live it out.
The shark makes its presence at the beach known early on by biting Nancy on the leg. She has to deal with that wound for the rest of the film, using her earrings as makeshift sutures, using her wetsuit as a compression sock, and watching gangrene set in as the shark keeps her trapped in the water. Falls on rocks, scrapes on coral, and a jellyfish sting also hinder her as she tries to survive. She calls out for help from anyone who comes to the beach, records a message on a dead surfer's GoPro, tries to catch the attention of a passing ship with flares found on a buoy… But as it turns out, the only way out of this situation is to cause the death of the shark in a rather improbable manner.
There isn't a lot Lisa and Kate can do to help themselves when they're sitting at the bottom of the ocean. It's not like they can kill all the sharks. At first they're told to wait until a replacement winch can be attached to their shark cage, then they're told to wait to be rescued by the Coast Guard. While waiting, they have to swim among the sharks for various reasons, like going up a few meters to communicate with the captain of the boat on the surface and grabbing extra oxygen tanks that are dropped to them. This allows the movie to have some shark action in it, adding more danger and causing the characters to suffer some cringe-inducing injuries.
In the sea of bad shark thrillers that have come out in the forty-four years since the release of JAWS, THE SHALLOWS and 47 METERS DOWN both stand out to me as two of the better shark thrillers out there. So while I have chosen THE SHALLOWS as the winner of this Face-Off, don't take that as me bashing 47 METERS DOWN, because I still think it's better than most other shark movies that aren't JAWS. I just find THE SHALLOWS to be the better, more entertaining film overall.
Do you agree with this outcome, or do you think 47 METERS DOWN should have won? Are you looking forward to 47 METERS DOWN: UNCAGED? Share your thoughts on these films in the comments section below. If you have suggestions for future Face-Off articles, you can send them to [email protected].
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