The Meg (Blu-Ray + DVD + Digital HD)
Blu-Ray Reviews | Nov 14th, 2018
Starring: Jason Statham, Li Bingbing, Rainn Wilson, Ruby Rose, Winston Chao, Cliff Curtis
Written By: Dean Georgaris, Jon Hoeber, Erich Hoeber
Directed By: Jon Turteltaub
Studio: Warner Bros
Buy On Amazon.com
The latest creature feature is about a giant, prehistoric shark and the man to go up against it? Well it’s Jason Statham of course! The Meg offers up enough frights and laughs, depending on how you approach the movie. It’s entertaining enough to watch on a boring weekend afternoon.
The movie is about the prehistoric megalodon wrecking havoc for a group of people in an underwater research facility. The megalodon attacked one of their submarine vessels with a few red shirts…err, people on board. They reach out to Jonas Taylor (Jason Statham), who has experienced this giant shark before retiring. Plus, his ex-wife is on board the vessel that was attacked so gives him a reason to come out of retirement. Like always, things don’t go as plan and they have to come up with several ways of battling the giant creature.
I didn’t really have any interest in watching the Meg but my wife was interested in seeing it so I got it for review. I enjoyed it but couldn’t help but kept thinking this was just stupid Jaws. If this was a Spielberg movie, only 1 or 2 main characters would have been left standing at the end and there would have been a bodycount of 20 in the first half hour. The problem with not only the Meg but a lot of these creature movies, is that they show that monster, creature or whatever right out of the gate. With Jaws, it was so effective because you just heard John Williams’ brilliant score and saw the fin. You didn’t really see it until halfway through the movie or something. Now with CGI, people think they can just show off the animal and think that’s a great payoff. It’s not and makes the movie not as good as what Spielberg accomplished.
The special effects for Meg were decent enough, but definitely some parts where it looks SyFy bad. The ending comes to mind with being extremely cheesy and unbelievable for some parts. The one scene where Jonas stabs the shark in the eye felt like something out of sharknado the way it was done. I thought there would be more deaths but does that make me morbid or just what’s expected with these movies? I would say the best death was one of the main characters getting it, when he thought he was safe. It was comical to me. I thought the twist towards the end was kind of dumb, because it just felt like we were ripped off a bit. I knew something was up when there was still a lot of movie left and he seemed like it was over. But will this please most fans of the shark genre? Yeah probably and considering how much money it made at the box office, we’re going to get more of these.
The Blu-Ray and digital HD extras have a making of featurette, a featurette on the creating the megalodon and then a quick fluff New Zealand film commission featurette. Nothing too special but I was hoping for a gag reel since I’m sure there was plenty of goofs and laughter on set.
The Meg isn’t that great of a movie but it was fun enough that it didn’t make me want to turn it off. Some people will love this, others will hate this and some will be in-between. I liked the idea that a megalodon never went extinct but I think the story and effects were a little too mediocre for my liking. Less is more with these type of movies. If they made a sequel, I’m sure everything will be doubled and way overdone and over the top. It felt like they already did a sequel within this movie just because of that “twist.”
Features:
Chomp on This: The Making of The Meg
Creating the Beast
New Zealand Film Commission
Video:
Codec: MPEG-4 AVC (19.02 Mbps)
Resolution: 1080p
Original aspect ratio: 2.39:1
Audio:
English: Dolby Atmos
English: Dolby TrueHD 7.1
English: DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 (48kHz, 16-bit)
French (Canada): Dolby Digital 5.1
Spanish: Dolby Digital 5.1 (448 kbps)
Portuguese: Dolby Digital 5.1
English: Dolby Digital 5.1 (448 kbps)
Subtitles:
English SDH, French, Portuguese, Spanish
Bottom Line: Stupid and fun but entertaining at the same time
Running Time: 113 mins
Rating: PG-13
Extras Rating:
Overall Rating:
