Movie Review: “47 Meters Down”
This past summer, the sequel to director Johannes Roberts’s 2017 summer blockbuster shark thriller was released, entitled “47 Meters Down: Uncaged.” The film features both old and new talents, including “The Book Thief” star Sophie Nélisse as well as Corinne Foxx, the daughter of American actor, singer and comedian, Jamie Foxx. The plot follows Mia, (Sophie Nélisse) a shy teenage girl who has followed her Dad (John Corbett), stepmom (Nia Long) and stepsister Sasha (Corinne Foxx), to Cancún, Mexico in order to assist with the family’s scuba diving business and her father’s research on the local underwater Mayan ruins.
At the beginning of the film, Mia struggles to adapt to her new environment and has to deal with being the new girl at her high school, finding it difficult to live with her step-sister Sasha. After her parents persuade the two sisters to spend time together, Sasha decides to invite Mia to go scuba diving with her and her two best friends, Alexa (Brianne Tju) and Nicole (Sistine Stallone).
The girls travel to a saltwater lagoon where they discover an entrance to the Mayan ruins their father is researching. The ruins are an endless maze of tunnels and ancient architecture with strange cavefish and corroded artifacts. They convince the weary Mia to go diving with them, but soon after, an accident occurs inside the temple which causes the ceiling to collapse, sealing them off from their only known exit.
The girls are then forced to continue further into the cave in a last attempt to find an exit, leading them to discover that they are not the only ones inside. With quickly depleting air from their scuba tanks and the presence of a menacing great white shark, the girls fight all odds to try to make it out. “47 Meters Down: Uncaged” had 90 minutes of screentime, with an impressive 90% of it being filmed entirely underwater.
With a 5.3 million dollar budget, most of the filming was done in underwater tanks in London over the course of a two month period. Actors were required to spend around eight hours a day in the underwater tanks shooting the cave scenes. Filming underwater is especially challenging due to the irregular dispersion of light and muted colors, but the film made great use of it, using eerie yellows and greens to create the essence of a true underwater cave.
Actor Brianne Tju, Mia’s friend in the film, commented about the difficulty of filming in the water in an IMDb interview. “It was tough coming to London to film the cave scenes after spending the last two weeks in the sunny Dominican Republic,” Tju commented about filming the beach and jungle portion of the film, “It was also difficult to act with scuba gear on and pretending to be scared of something that isn’t with you,” she added about shooting the scenes without the sharks in the pre-CGI portion of the film. As evidenced by the post-production manipulation required, “47 Meters Down: Uncaged” is another example of films over-exaggerating the violence of sharks and adding another unrealistic example of how ‘bloodthirsty’ they can be.
Movies like the “Jaws” trilogy and “The Meg” show the public a false depiction of these animals, creating a fear among the public, the opposite of what these animals need. The World Wildlife Organization has classified great white sharks as vulnerable endangered species, with only 3,500 great whites in the oceans as of 2019, compared to 20,000 in 1990. Looking at all species, illegal trophy hunting, in addition to hunting for teeth and fins, has resulted in almost 10 million total shark killings in the past year. Rotten Tomatoes, a movie reviewing company rated this film a 4.75/10 and a C+ for their ratings. Despite the poor first impressions, the movie grossed about $31.6 million dollars worldwide according to box office sales, almost triple what the original budget was for the film. And despite many critics disapproving, these films promoting anti-shark hysteria still remain very popular among moviegoers nationwide.