“There’s poetry here,” says the protagonist of Mega Shark versus Giant Octopus as she potters about beneath Arctic waves in her poorly rendered cgi submarine.
The titular titans of the prehistoric seas were engaged in a battle to the death millions of years ago when they were encased in ice (those ice ages certainly do jump up on you), only to be released – rather dubiously – into our time by an unexplained sonar device and some pissed off whales, an event the monsters deal with by going on a global ocean killing spree while people in tactical emergency rooms utter subtle, nuanced lines like “There’s something big out there; something really big.”
Wordsworth, eat your heart out. (Or a Megalodon shark will do it for you.)
Meet mankind’s intrepid eco-warrior saviours. Looking at the above picture, you might think that lead character Emma looks less than excited/distraught/insert-dynamic-emotion-here to be caught up in this clash of monsters. She’s certainly pretty nonnchalant about it all in the film, going in the space of about twenty-five minutes from “We have to make every attempt to capture these creatures alive. For science.” to a half-hearted “It’s going to be a bloodbath :)”.
Not that I blame her, mind you. If I was surrounded by a cast of such horrific stereotypes, I think I’d be gunning for a bloodbath too. I wouldn’t get one though; not with this kind of budget. There are entire scenes where a boat or something will be destroyed without a single shot of whichever beast it is performing the attack, leaving the viewer wondering if the crew had perhaps succumbed to realisation of where their careers had taken them, and sunk themselves.
.
.
The film is, of course, still a blast to watch 😉
(Not even the clouds are safe from GIANT OCTOPUS!)
Digital Metaphor 