Review of 47 Meters Down (2017) by Jeff W — 09 Nov 2017

Hey, there are worse shark movies. So this is about pair of sisters (Mandy Moore, Claire Holt), getting away from it all and vacationing in Mexico. Over drinks one night, they get talked into doing something very exotic: getting into a shark cage the next day and being just feet away from some Great Whites.

Well, wouldn't you know it that something winds up going wrong, and it isn't long before they are at the ocean floor with a very limited supply of oxygen. I like shark movies as much as the next guy, but at this point, I do have the opinion that there is not much new you can do with it.

Jaws perfected it, then Syfy took it to a ridiculously silly level, but there are still movies like The Shallows that gain cult followings. This would make for a pretty good double feature with the latter, as they are just about the same in quality.

Now for having a modest budget ($5.5 million), this actually looks pretty good from an effects standpoint. I couldn't really tell what are were special effect sharks and what were real sharks, assuming that there were any in the first place.

That said, it is still a pretty standard movie, and you know exactly where it is going to go. It would have been far more memorable if it had just a few surprises in it. You just KNOW as soon as the peer pressure comes from the attractive people over drinks one night, there is no way these girls aren't getting in the shark cage the next morning.

You always know where this is going, and you can even tell who is most likely to survive simply by looking at the cast list. I do prefer this marginally over The Shallows, but they are right in the same wheelhouse.

The one thing that I did like featured in this that you don't see in a ton of shark movies is they address the non-shark problems that can happen when you are underwater; if you come up too quickly, you can get the bends, or you can get nitrogen narcosis if you try to swap out air tanks fully submerged.

Of course, I'm sure the science isn't at all tight on this, and I'm also sure if you do any sort of diving in your personal life, you will very likely scrutinize this for a laundry list of factual errors.

As a diving layman, I say that 47 Meters Down is alright.