Deep Blue Sea still reigns as the eminent anti-Jaws

“A hundred million sharks are murdered every year,” impassioned activist Mika (Léa Léviant) decries in Under Paris, the recent Netflix original about a massive shortfin mako that manages to swim up the Seine and breed in the city’s catacombs. “Decades of overfishing have deprived sharks of their food source, forcing them to hunt in new territories.” Indeed, the crux of this otherwise outlandish premise revolves around how man-made climate change has begun to infringe on the existence of vital ecosystems, causing nature to retaliate against humanity itself.

The irony of a killer shark thriller denouncing the dissemination of shark populations is all too obvious, considering that the ubiquitous fear over these so-called “man eaters” was, in essence, forged by film. While it’s ludicrous to single-handedly pin the endangerment of an entire species on Peter Benchley’s 1974 novel Jaws and Steven Spielberg’s iconic 1975 adaptation, both have expressed remorse for their respective portrayals of a rogue great white shark and its inadvertent cultural ripple. (Particularly Benchley, who devoted much of his life to marine conservation as a result.) Spielberg noted on a 2022 episode of BBC’s Desert Island Discs podcast that “one of the things I still fear [is] not to get eaten by a shark, but that sharks are somehow mad at me for the feeding frenzy of crazy sport fishermen that happened after 1975…I really, truly regret that.” 

While the Jaws franchise has certainly employed a vengeance-seeking shark plotline, only one aquatic horror film has actually done the legwork to make these creatures literal big-brained orchestrators of carnage. Of course, the title in question is Renny Harlin’s 1999 action opus Deep Blue Sea, in which rogue scientist Dr. Susan McCallister (Saffron Burrows) genetically enhances the brain mass of shortfin makos to harvest their tissue for Alzheimer’s research. Big brains beget big grudges, and the test sharks eventually flood the expansive lab in order to pick off their captors and escape, because apparently “that’s what an 8,000 pound mako thinks about: about freedom, about the deep blue sea.”

Directed by Xavier Gens—whose gory 2007 film Frontier(s) is comfortably classified within the New French Extremity horror subgenre—Under Paris clearly riffs on Deep Blue Sea, though it lacks the specific concoction of action sequences, star power, and shock that continues to make its predecessor so memorable. For one, both employ shortfin makos as the aggressor, an interesting choice due to the species’ documented interactions with humans. Since 1984, there have only been three fatal attacks perpetrated by these sharks, most likely due to encounters with fishermen who hunt the animal for game. (In contrast, great whites have fatally attacked at least 59 people in the same timeframe). The fastest shark in the sea and capable of jumping up to 30 feet in the air, the majesty of the shortfin mako is ingrained; however, humans have identified these as exciting qualities that make the fish entertaining to hunt in spite of its endangered status.

“Nature is lethal, but it doesn’t hold a candle to man,” muses Russell Franklin (Samuel L. Jackson), the financier of Dr. McCallister’s ambitious research. He’s speaking from experience, as one of a handful of survivors during an expedition in the snowy Alps that went horribly wrong. After recounting the secret that he vowed to take to his grave—that it wasn’t the frigid conditions that killed two troupe members before they were rescued—an albeit cartoonishly CG shark manifests from the water’s edge and drags Russell into the murky depths, viciously ripping him apart in clear view of the other horrified crewmembers.

Deep Blue Sea is not without a pronounced sense of humor, killing the biggest name on the bill in a move that mimics Drew Barrymore’s unexpected slaughter in Scream. The death is at once unexpected but perfectly cogent within the film’s logic, as if the shark provoked a deathbed confession without the speaker’s knowledge that these would, indeed, be some of his last words. Man may be just as lethal as mother nature, but both apparently share a pronounced taste for poetics.

Any shark movie will inevitably invoke the unsurpassable brilliance of Jaws, but Deep Blue Sea manages to include nods that don’t feel trite. The Louisiana license plate found in the belly of a tiger shark is lodged in a mako’s maw instead, and the film’s climax similarly leaves only two standing amid an ocean chummed with an exploded shark carcass. Yet the gonzo action and near-constant submersion of the characters in a rapidly-flooding single location make it truly unique, requiring entire days where the crew would have to don wetsuits and ensure that equipment would fare well white wet. (Much of the set was created atop the water tanks used for James Cameron’s epic Titanic, likely imperative to this relative success.) Certain action sequences were also perhaps a bit too heart-pounding for the cast: They were tumbled by an accidental swell of water and lead actor Thomas Jane—who plays the hands-on aquatic expert and brooding bad boy Carter Blake—swam with real sharks in The Bahamas, an experience he said was “so terrifying that I don’t want to remember it.”

Jaws was also famously plagued by on-set mishaps, namely the mechanical shark regularly breaking down, resulting in its predominantly off-screen presence. There are sharks aplenty in Deep Blue Sea, rendered with both practical and VFX (personally, I don’t believe that Jane’s experience swimming with sharks ever made it into the final cut). Again, this encourages viewers to dispel notions of previous shark-centric cinema from their minds while watching, as the aggravated presence of these creatures is what captivates one’s attention from the start. There’s no need to go searching for sharks; they’re right in front of our eyes from the get-go until the tables inevitably turn. As the Watchmen quote goes: “I’m not locked in here with you. You’re locked in here with me!” 

Deep Blue Sea and Under Paris both diverge from the predominant narrative presented in other shark fare in the sense that these feeding frenzies are actually caused by humans, not the other way around. The latter film opens in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a vast accumulation of floating plastic roughly three times the size of France. It’s here where Lilith, the aptly-named female shark that researcher Sophia Assalas (Bérénice Bejo) has been tracking, fatally attacks her crew as they attempt to take a blood sample. “With the effects of climate change and pollution, the sharks have changed their behavior,” activist Mika later tells a dumbfounded Sophia after it’s revealed that Lilith has traveled across the globe and has serendipitously landed in the Seine. 

Though Under Paris has a prominent environmental message, Deep Blue Sea set out to make man the villain in what was, at the time, considered a subversive move. Screenwriter Duncan Kennedy was able to have extended talks with scientists while working on the screenplay because he ensured that the film’s sharks would be presented “as man-made, unlike Jaws which demonized natural sharks.” (God only knows if any of their factual input actually made its way into the final film.) Narratively, Under Paris overwhelmingly plays into the framework that Jaws established nearly 50 years ago, including a central money-hungry mayor who opts to serve swimmers up as “a smörgåsbord” instead of canceling a costly triathlon. The French film does score major points for its incredible timeliness, considering the ongoing controversy of the Seine’s alleged cleaning ahead of the Olympic triathlon set to take place on July 30. (Current Parisian mayor Anne Hidalgo recently took a dip even after unsafe levels of E. coli were detected during the month of June, which itself resulted in civilians threatening to poop in the river as an act of protest over the ineffective sanitation solution on taxpayer’s dime.)

But perhaps the most relevant aspect of Under Paris is the insistence that this shark is not out for blood, merely its own survival. Across the pond, beachgoers in the U.S. have been wary of the water after a recent string of shark sightings and attacks off the coast of Florida and Texas that occurred on the Fourth of July, proving that life does, in fact, imitate art. While no signs point to incompetent, greedy officials allowing swimmers where a shark is knowingly on the prowl, the climate crisis is likely contributing to these encounters in a major way. Warming ocean temperatures are potentially tampering with shark migration patterns, and the general impact on marine life caused by overfishing and pollution are also causing shark’s prey to move to new locations. (In an inadvertent positive, cleaner water conditions around N.Y.C. have caused seals to return to local harbors, bringing hungry sharks with them, likely accounting for the rise in shark sightings in the ocean surrounding the metropolis.) In short, man-made changes result in nature following the course we’ve constructed for it. “If the oceans can’t survive, then neither can us humans,” elaborates Mika before encouraging Parisians to assemble to defend Lilith from the encroaching threat of murder.

he insane brilliance of Deep Blue Sea is that, at least subconsciously, it believes that if sharks and humans were on the same intellectual playing field, we’d be toast. There’s no call to coexist, merely to understand our utter insignificance compared to a creature that’s existed for 400 million years. If we’re laughably ill-equipped as a species, we may as well invoke some actual comedy from the spectacle. This is where scene-stealer LL Cool J swoops in, playing a bible-quoting chef complete with an amusingly vulgar pet parrot. Pools of blood, pyrotechnic blasts, and belly laughs meld into each other in a fantastic marriage between the best of R-rated and B-movie conventions.

The only chortle had during Under Paris happens during the very beginning of the film, where a quote reads: “The species that survive aren’t the strongest species, nor are they the most intelligent, but rather the ones who best adapt to change.” The attribution? “Based on Charles Darwin.” Not even bothering to directly cite the British naturalist, the film immediately begs you to dismiss it as kind of lazy. Upon reflection of this “quote,” however, I’ve found that it perfectly describes why Deep Blue Sea has amassed a certain cultural staying power despite its ridiculous nature. It’s not the strongest shark film, nor is it the most intelligent—but its commitment to changing the landscape of the shark horror subgenre 25 years ago can still be appreciated today, even if other shark movies since have made their own waves: Open Water opted for the realism of shooting with live sharks, The Shallows focuses on a single surfer out-swimming a circling great white, and the 47 Meters Down franchise accidentally plunges its protagonists to intense depths as oxygen supplies dwindle.

Yet the myth of monstrosity still pervades within each of these plots, even if human error is to blame for these encounters with sharks. Deep Blue Sea so effectively portrayed humans as antagonists that test audiences advocated for a would-be love interest to perish due to their involvement in the super-sharks’ very existence, necessitating minor reshoots to the ending. Imagine managing that with Jaws not even 25 years in the rearview; imagine managing that now. Horror films that center on sharks aren’t going away anytime soon, but it’s unlikely we’ll see another that actively rejects comparisons to the greatest film the subgenre will ever see.