The Best Movie Critic   +  review

Notes on Camp: Deep Blue Sea

FUCKING SHAAAAARKS!!! You guys, SHARKS! Sharks are unobjectively awesome. They eat everything, have giant fucking teeth, and have you seen this video? I have to go change my pants, because I just shit them. I’m cool with sharks, because I live in a land-locked state, so I’m not super worried about encountering one, and I only visit my family on the coast once or twice a year, so, like, what are the odds? But I would DEFINITELY NOT GO to a rusty old underwater World War II submarine base that is now used as a research facility for genetically engineered, hyper-intelligent sharks/Alzheimer’s disease, even if I had to for work – it’s called common sense. POP QUIZ WORD PROBLEM:You are an Alzheimer’s disease researcher who needs to make new drugs by giving human-equivalent brain power to one animal, which animal do you choose?

a) Tiny white mice.
b) Declawed kittens!! (I’ll take three, please!)
c) Monkeys or babies or something.
d) FUCKING SHAAAAARKS!!! that you keep in a rusty old submarine base called Aquatica surrounded by chain-link fence in the middle of the ocean.
I’m no “scientist”, but I would definitely choose b), since kittens are cute anyway, and when they’re declawed they have soft, adorable paws which you can gently touch to your face as though an angel is kissing you – plus if you gave them human brains they could feel love that would be emotionally satisfying to people and not just manipulative like the kind of love that cats normally feel for humans, but I digress. Where was I? (kittenskittenskittens) Oh yes, sharks.

If sharks are awesome, it kind of goes without saying that movies about sharks are also awesome (math and logic are but two of my skills), and Deep Blue Sea is no exception. It systematically one-ups all other shark movies ever. And by “shark movies”, I mean Jawses 1, 2, 3, and The Revenge since there really aren’t any others I can think of off the top of my head. Jaws has character development, suspense, and my shameful crush Young Richard Dreyfuss (make.out.with.me), but Deep Blue Sea has HUMAN-BRAINED MAKO SHARKS (and a regular-brained tiger shark that gets eaten by the clearly mentally superior makos, idiot). Advantage: Deep Blue Sea, obvs. Since all of my Alzheimer’s research is based on the plot of Deep Blue Sea, I can say for sure that it can be cured by injecting the brain cells of Smartsharks into the brains of old people, and then they will not have Alzheimer’s anymore, but unfortunately they will be hungry for seals and pasty underwater scientists. So, really, Deep Blue Sea is a documentary in which Samuel L Jackson is bitten in half and eaten by Harvard-educated sea predators. SPOILER ALERT, btw. Sections of Deep Blue Sea are probably a little too winky for it to be true Camp, but whatever. As the Smartsharks slowly flood the research facility (with their brains!!), they seem to shrink and grow as the plot requires them to. Sometimes they look to be the size of a school bus, only to swim through the tiny bedroom door of their Hot British Scientist creator as she strips out of her wet suit in a moment of vulnerability – Smartsharks are also, apparently, kind of like horny teenaged boys. An entire subplot has Aquatica’s chef (LL Cool J, for real) trying to escape the sharks while simultaneously attempting to rescue his pet parrot. SPOILER ALET PT. 2: the Parrot gets eaten. I’m not going to bother summarizing the plot, because, I mean, SMARTSHARKS!! Does it matter? There are many characters, including Hot British Scientist (pictured above), Annoying Blonde Girl, LL Cool J, Hunky Shark Wrangler (pictured in my nocturnal emissions), and Humorous Engineer, but they don’t act like real humans do, so why should I treat them as such? The plot treats them as little more than shark food. Apparently there’s something called “The Harvard Compact”, which Hot British Scientist has broken by injecting human brains into mako sharks – OOPS!! – and so I guess there are some disturbing bio-ethical implications, also an awesome potential Sea World Exhibit, but we’ll leave that for actual movies to explore (Like Splice! So good! Why didn’t you see it?).

IMDB posits that a total of 8 writers had a hand in the finished “screenplay”, but they should have left it to the sharks to write. Smartsharks have the ability to write, but they also know about the Smartshark experience in a way that most people don’t. Do human-screenwriters know what it’s like to be held hostage by rogue Alzheimer’s researchers in an abandoned sub station and experimented upon like common rodents? I don’t think so. Smartsharks are not the rats of NIMH, nor should we treat them as such, BECAUSE THEY WILL EAT YOU. I learned from the Internet that sharks only have to eat every once and awhile, only about 4 pounds per week depending on their weight. Wuzzah? Then how come the sharks in Deep Blue Sea eat entire 170-pound scientists every 9 minutes or so? How do they even have the stomach capacity? I’m starting to sense some inaccuracies here… wait, is that an LL Cool J rap-song playing over the closing credits?! I love rap about sharks! It’s my favorite subgenre of rap. I think “when the Titanic sinks, I’M THE ONE YOU GONNA MEET!” is the best song lyric ever written. Is there such a thing as a Retroactive Grammy for Raps About Sharks Based on Movies? I have to go and start my letter to the Grammys. Suck it, Kanye. -Ryan