Review| The Meg

Around here we don’t like to give credence to the claim that the “turn your brain off and have fun” kind of movies actually exist. We hear this so often and cringe. Our disdain against this proclamation is built into our very motto, “entertainment is not mindless”. As I walked into my late Thursday night viewing of The Meg, I had to remind myself of this fact. For a week I had been hearing things like “dumb fun”, and “it’s so bad it’s good”. One review even titles itself “We’re going to need a stupider boat”. It is with this backdrop that audiences flocked to theaters to the tune of over $44 million last weekend, more than either Ready Player One or The Equalizer 2 in their opening weekends. If audiences are craving intelligence and originality in their movie-going experience, they have a funny way of showing it.

Long story short, and my personal ire for modern trailers notwithstanding, if you’ve seen the trailer you’ve basically of seen the movie. Very little effort is made to give the characters much dimensionality aside from a quick mention of something in their background, or a series of one-liners from expendable characters meant to pull on our heartstrings when they were inevitably devoured. The one technical exception to a host of surface level characters is our lead, Jonas (Jason Statham).

The film begins some years ago with Jonas and his crew of rescue divers attempting to save members on board a sunken submarine in the Philippine Trench. The ensuing calamity and its mental impact on Jonas serves as the backdrop against which he must decide to go back into the water. For a movie like The Meg-whose depth could never hope to conceal a dorsal fin, and whose plot is trumped in complexity by a game of hop scotch-this is all the background needed to move things forward. We’re on the side of the hero despite his conflicted past while also hoping for his triumphant victory over his current foe, which also happens to be the size of a submarine. Along the way people are eaten, sharks are killed, and nobody learns much of anything. No effort at all is made to revisit the series of events leading to the uncovering of the Meg and perhaps ask whether it should have been done (a-la Jurrasic Park), or ask if the existence of prehistoric creatures says anything about whether we belong here or not (a-la Annihilation… maybe, I’m still not sure).

In my estimation, The Meg serves best as a lesson in succumbing to enticement. The studio made no bones about promoting this as ‘man vs. giant shark’ and letting our imaginations run wild. Admittedly, the teaser trailer had me with little more than a shot of the Meg sneaking up on a little girl and attempting to bite through safety glass and leaving huge teeth marks. You all saw it. I believe my audible reaction was something like, ‘whoa!’. Hook, line, and sinker. This is how little I needed to decide I was in. While my expectations for the story and character always remained low, I was hoping to see some great CGI and the biggest shark ever on screen getting punched by Jason Statham. On nearly all fronts I was disappointed. That certainly speaks volumes for the movie, but doesn’t it also say something about me and hold easy it was to get my butt in the seat?

For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine; but wanting to have their ears tickled, they will accumulate for themselves teachers in accordance to their own desires, and will turn away their ears from the truth and will turn aside to myths. -2 Tim. 4:3f

Forgive the blatant Bible-juke for a moment, but it strikes me that something which has plagued religion for centuries was at work on myself and many others this past weekend; an enticement to what appears pleasing with no promise of substance. My eyes and ears were tickled, so to speak. With no indication of a compelling narrative, and little evidence of characters that will last in my mind beyond the exit doors, I walked right in.

I frame this as a light critique on the viewing public today as well as myself, but my bet is we know what we’re getting into. I don’t imagine anyone was expecting this generations Jaws. But that really makes it worse, doesn’t it? We yearn for stories that speak to our heart, that make us think and engage our mind. But we’re perfectly capable of subjecting ourselves to the opposite. I don’t mean for this analogy to follow all the way through cinematically to The Meg, but theologically speaking, what this indicates is that we’re comfortable with surrounding ourselves with doctrines that are false and make us feel good rather than those that are true and convict us. We’ll give audience to what’s enticing, self-affirming, and fun. When confronted with the truth of the Gospel, or even a narrative that convicts us of our error in a closely held belief, we’re not as quick to rush to ticket office, or the Teacher.

The Meg taught me that huge sharks on the big screen sounds like lots of fun, but it also taught me that I’m far too easily enticed by the next shiny object waved in front of me.