Review of The Shallows (2016) by Dodringo64 — 23 Jun 2016

I was actually exited to see this film since the story itself sounds really thrilling, plus I just love shark films like Jaws. Also, it seems like people don't care about shark films any more when stuff such as Sharknado is a thing. And one final thing, the director actually made three really enjoyable Liam Neesom movies in the past, and also made House Of Wax, which kinda sucked.

So, after seeing the movie, is it as good as Jaws? Nope. Honestly, it was just fun. It never reached the dramatic heights that I wanted it to or that it was even aiming for. It's actually a pretty serious movie at times, there's some kind of backstory with the main character with something that happened with her family in the past, I won't go into spoilers for your sake. I really feel that this movie really didn't reach the dramatic heights that it was aiming for, although the actress, Blake Lively, gave an amazing perfomance in this movie and the shark is actually a really well done CGI shark. The one thing that really bugged me about this movie was the tone. It had a very conflicting tone. It starts out with very upbeat music and then feels much more serious with the shark and then you get more intense music, so the movie was unable to sustain that feeling of suspense. Jaws started building up the tension right from the get-go but this movie doesn't do that, it feels very modern with some of the music choices. Even some of the directing choices were weird, they really overused slow-mo in this film which annoyed me. So, one last thing and the major complaint for me about this film, was some of the story choices. So, there is a question being constantly repeated throughout the movie, again, no spoilers, and this question is just suddenly dropped without ever giving you an answer.

So, overall, The Shallows was a well-made, competently directed for the most part and exiting to watch...for the most part. Yeah, some bad choices were made but really, it's not so bad. This movie deserves a 7, good but definitely not great.