A Brief History
On August 20, 2020, we finally got around to watching the third installment in the Deep Blue Sea movie franchise, the aptly named Deep Blue Sea 3. Released on July 28, 2020, the film serves as a direct sequel to the second movie in the franchise, Deep Blue Sea 2, and like the first sequel, #3 is a direct to video release. (Watch it “On Demand” or on a streaming site.) Picking up where the first 2 films left off, with the genetic tinkering with of deadly sharks, the mad scientists have created intelligent killing machines that must be dealt with by good hearted scientists with good intentions, while dealing with corporate greed and corruption. Exactly who the “sharks” are in this film is debatable!
Digging Deeper
Though not a big budget extravaganza with big name stars (like the first film), the special effects are good enough for the sharks to seem quite real, although larger than their real life counterparts and with markedly different behavior. While the first film dealt with the genetic alteration of Mako sharks and a high tech sea lab, the second film was a “stand alone” effort and this time the sharks were the Bull Shark variety, not as “cool” as the graceful and sinister looking Mako, but in reality a much more dangerous shark to humans. Deep Blue Sea 3 is a continuation of the story from #2, with escaped genetically altered super aggressive and super intelligent big Bull sharks on the loose and in need of rounding up. Of course, while on the loose the sharks commit murder and mayhem!
With a team of aquatic mercenaries in hot pursuit, the mercs and sharks end up at a small man-made island that is on the way to oblivion courtesy of rising sea levels due to global warming. On this island is a small team of shark researchers. Of course, the guy leading the mercenary shark killers (played by Nathaniel Buzolic, a former soap opera and Weather Channel television actor) is the ex-lover of the beautiful female marine biologist (played by Tania Raymonde of Malcolm in the Middle television fame) on the little island. Bren Foster, a veteran of The Last Ship television series and a martial arts expert, plays the “heavy,” a ruthless shark and people killing mercenary out to “clean up the mess” caused by the corporation that unleashed the killer sharks on the world. Supporting actors likewise are well cast and play good roles in the film.
Director John Pogue does a reasonably decent job with a kind of predictable formulaic script (written by Dick Blackman) with plenty of action to keep the audience riveted to the screen, including a couple of jump scares the Deep Blue franchise is known for. The sharks and people are deadly, and there is decent tension in wondering which characters will survive and which will end up as shark bait. Running time is 99 minutes, but it seems shorter due to the fast pace of the action.
Watching the film right after a couple of weeks of intense shark related television documentary shows made the experience so apropos! The sharks and action were plenty frightening, so you might keep young children out of the room. Between the Discovery, National Geographic and Animal Planet shark shows and this colorful film complete with gore (a guy bitten in half still tooling along behind an underwater scooter!) you might not want to go into the water ever again!! We don’t!
Still, the movie, though silly in certain ways and predictable in others, was quite entertaining and if you enjoyed the first 2 Deep Blue Sea films you will almost assuredly enjoy this one as well.
Note: This author, getting on in years as it is, collecting retirement pay and Social Security, is blown away by the improvement in movie special effects where even direct to video movies can have such realistic looking sharks compared to the pathetic special effects monsters of the 1950’s and 1960’s. We salute the FX people involved in the film industry!
Question for students (and subscribers): What is your favorite shark related movie? Please let us know in the comments section below this article.
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Historical Evidence
For more information, please see…
Healy, Joseph. Unspeakable Horror: The Deadliest Shark Attacks in Maritime History. Skyhorse, 2017.
Skerry, Brian. Shark. National Geographic, 2017.
The featured image in this article, a poster for Deep Blue Sea 3, is of a poster, and the copyright for it is most likely owned by either the publisher or the creator of the work depicted. It is believed that the use of scaled-down, low-resolution images of posters to provide critical commentary on the film, event, etc. in question or of the poster itself, not solely for illustration on a website used for educational purposes, hosted on servers in the United States, qualifies as fair use under the copyright law of the United States.
