Last week, I didn’t write up my impressions of The Meg because it was just too depressing. I was first dismayed at the opening sequence and set up because it postulates that there is a whole new, ancient, isolated biome at the bottom of a deep ocean trench, over 10 thousand meters down, and nothing makes sense. There are giant sharks prowling around this lightless, constricted deep? Why? How? They explore it with a surprisingly roomy manned submersible, which is almost plausible — people have gone down almost 11,000 meters in a bathyscaphe — but why, in this modern day, wouldn’t the preliminary observations have been made with an ROV? There’s also a scene where a submarine is damaged by a monster shark at this depth, and…
…it explodes in a giant fireball.
If you don’t get why that was incredibly stupid, then maybe this is the movie for you. I just couldn’t get past the absence of any acknowledgment of pressure in a movie that has subs shuttling like yo-yos between the bottom of the ocean and the surface, and that has a giant shark found in a marginal habitat that can survive being squirted straight up to terrorize coastal waters.
I guess there were supposed to be some jump scares in there, but I was unable to recover any ability to suspend disbelief after the first 5 minutes. Also, I just didn’t care about any of the characters, except to hope they got eaten. I was mostly disappointed there, too. It made me so cranky I even wanted the stupid little dog to get inhaled, and once again, no joy.
This week, I saw Operation Finale, which wasn’t bad at all. It’s basically a vehicle for the two stars, Oscar Isaac and Ben Kingsley, to reverberate off each other, and they were both good. It’s the tale of the Israeli operation to extract Adolph Eichmann from Argentina in the early 1960s so that he could face justice for his role in engineering the Holocaust, so it’s very much a good vs. evil story…but it’s a complex difficult good vs. a deceitful, slimy evil, so it isn’t at all cartoonish.
It helps that I hate Nazis. I didn’t have much trouble believing this story.
Also playing this week: The Predator. I just said no. It’s getting easier to avoid some bad movies now that we have a two screen theater and have more choices.
Usually more choices, that is. Next week we’re getting Unbroken: Path to Redemption, some treacly Christian movie directed by Harold Cronk, of the God’s Not Dead series. That’s a fuck no from me. The other choice is The Nun, a supernatural horror movie, which makes for an interesting combination. I’m just hoping some devout Christian fanatic attends both on the basis of the titles, and ends up running screaming from the theater. As for me, though, it looks like I’ll be sitting out the next week.