Respond to these rapid questions in our The Shallows quiz and we will tell you which The Shallows character you are. Play it now.
In “The Shallows,” which runs for 87 minutes, the action takes place mostly in a lagoon, where a surfer who has been injured is fighting a shark. There isn’t much more to the plot than that, and the little that the film tries to add doesn’t make it any more interesting. Its situations are primal, and they are frequently terrifying. The fact that they take place in a relatively small area — a stretch of shore-bordered water that appears to be about a kilometer across — adds to the suspense…. When it’s at its best, the film from screenwriter Anthony Jaswinski and director Jaume Collet-Serra (“Non-Stop,” “Run All Night”) is as close to a pure action film as mainstream cinema has seen since “Mad Max: Fury Road” was released in 2008. It frequently employs its star, Blake Lively, in the same way that “Mad Max: Fury Road” director George Miller employed his actors: as a kinetic sculptural object that also has the ability to think, feel, and die on the spot.
In advance publicity, “The Shallows” was promoted as a horror film or perhaps a modern take on “Jaws,” but it is really a survival thriller about a woman who must survive against nature, which is represented most of the time by a shark the size of a Winnebago, but not always. In all seriousness, this slate-grey beast is as massive as the great white shark that killed the Orca in “Jaws,” and it’s a lot more agile, leaping into the air and twisting to snatch prey from hard-to-reach areas of the ocean.
Nancy, Lively’s character, a medical school dropout, comes face to face with the shark while vacationing on a Mexican beach that used to be a favorite of her mother, who died of cancer recently. We learn about Nancy’s past through iPhone photos and expository dialogue, and this background information is every bit as necessary for us to understand her current predicament as Dennis Weaver’s internal monologue was in Steven Spielberg’s breakthrough, pre-“Jaws,” television movie “Duel.” In other words, it isn’t. This is a lean, brutal film about endurance and problem-solving that will leave you breathless. There are so many unanswered questions raised by the filmmaking—much of which is wordless, driven by images, sound effects, and Marco Beltrami’s breathless score—that when Nancy says something like “forty meters” or “I’ve got you figured out,” it’s as if the film has temporarily lost faith in its ability to excite and upset us at the same time.
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Lively is outstanding in this film, delivering one of those hyper-focused, action-driven performances that is as much an athletic accomplishment as it is an aesthetic achievement. There are a few supporting characters, the majority of whom are used as shark bait, but “The Shallows” is essentially a one-woman show that elevates Lively to a jagged rocky pedestal and worships her as a result. During the night scenes, she wears a bikini that is so brightly orange that it appears to be refracting moonlight, and not since the heyday of Kevin Costner in the 1990s has a star’s posterior been subjected to such intense scrutiny. Lively does a significant amount of her own surfing (with a double filling in during the most dangerous bits). Screaming, clinging to the cliffs, cursing, diving into murky depths, swimming through chop, she runs and climbs. Similar to Tom Hanks’ character in “Cast Away,” she has a non-human “buddy” with whom she can converse: a seagull whom she names Steven (get it?). It’s corny—in fact, much of the film is corny, often knowingly so—but damned if you don’t find yourself rooting for that bird and fretting that it won’t make it through to the credits at the end.
The Shallows Quiz
After a while, you get to know Nancy’s physical condition well enough to be able to fill out her hospital admission forms, and you get to know the beach well enough to be able to draw a map of it, noting major points of interest such as the shoreline, a buoy, two outcroppings of rock, and a rotting whale carcass floating farther out. Other threats exist besides the shark, such as plants and animals that have no stake in whether or not the star survives, or that would prefer to see her dead than see her live again if she does. While the filmmaker keeps us as close to Nancy as possible—at times, we’re literally in her face—he also takes a cue from Steven Spielberg and shows us bits and pieces of the shark: a dorsal fin here, a flash-cut to jagged teeth there, a shadow gliding between the camera and Nancy’s flailing legs.
Also, you will find out which character are you in this The Shallows quiz.
When it comes to conveying its messages, “The Shallows” fails to recognize how little is required to do so effectively. With out the exposition and inspirational back-story, it could’ve been an extremely powerful film, as opposed to being clever and nerve-wracking. It could’ve been a female-centric response to the Robert Redford survival film “All is Lost,” which treated an elderly man’s boating mishap as if it were a deleted chapter from “The Odyssey.” When the film gets close to the end, there’s a scene that would’ve made an excellent final shot (you’ll know it when you see it), but the filmmakers feel compelled to keep going, much to the film’s detriment. In addition, the special effects and editing are not always as sharp as Lively’s performance deserves to be. Even so, it’s a taut, brutal film that pits a ravenous sea creature against a woman who’s ten times harder than coral. It takes its toll on you.
For more personality quizzes check this: Jack Reacher Never Go Back Quiz.
