A RECENT cinema trip which promised to offer a couple of hours of cheesy escapism reneged on the deal by smuggling in an unexpectedly healthy dose of political propaganda.
Popcorn and a mild hangover in tow, I shuffled into my seat fully expecting to be mildly entertained for 90 minutes and go home. The film, which has jumped on the band wagon of the megalodon subcategory of the much-loved and belligerently enduring shark attack genre, sees The Meg – a 25 ft prehistoric mega-shark – and the film’s hero (an average-size man armed primarily with some nifty weapons, a few one-liners and a six-pack) go head to head in a battle to the death, usually as result of an exploration team poking their noses where they shouldn’t and aggravating said mega-shark. You get the picture.
Surprisingly, the first thing which conjured a raised eyebrow wasn’t the sight of a non-mega-man in his early fifties struggle to outwit a cartoonishly enormous CGI shark; it was the replacement of the staple white, blonde American heroine swooning and panicking by his side throughout.
In this case and rather unusually, the leading lady was a Chinese woman who looked a mere ten years younger than the leading man – as opposed to the now cemented industry standard of 20. None of this would have been surprising had I known before going that this was a Warner Brothers, US-Chinese co-produced film, engineered for a Chinese audience. Although I’ll admit this felt original. Looking at the plot more closely, a theory came to mind…was it a message?
In short, a rugged English deep-sea diver is recruited to fight a super-sized prehistoric shark along with a team of American oceanographers and scientists off the Chinese coast, with the mission being led by a Chinese father-and-daughter duo. However, the childish, egotistical, narcissistic US investor backing the project felt similar to America’s current leader as well as its nightmarish trading tactics.
At one point, in one last oafish attempt to finish things off his own way, the American investor quite literally throws a bomb at the problem – another familiar tactic. The film, which comes at a critical juncture amid the trade wars Trump has decided to wage against China, was predominately financed by China and tells the story of a group of smart Chinese, English and Americans cleaning up the mess made by the short-sighted blunders of their greedy US benefactor. To the surprise of the critics and no doubt the studios, it is so far, the highest-grossing film of the year.
