Monster movie fans were thrilled when Ben Wheatley was confirmed as director of Meg 2: The Trench. The director of Kill List unleashed on a film in which Jason Statham battles giant prehistoric sharks? To quote the Sickos meme: “YES. .. HA HA HA ... YES!” The trailer looked promising. This could have been just what the fledgling franchise needed, especially as even Jon Turteltaub, director of the first Meg, had expressed disappointment at the first film’s lack of gore. “The number of really horrifying, disgusting and bloody deaths we had lined up that we didn’t get to do is tragic,” he told bloodydisgusting.com.
But the market knows what it wants, which in the case of The Meg was a family film with a PG or 12A rating. Additionally, it was a US-Chinese co-production, and Chinese censors don’t like gore. Well, guess what: Meg 2: The Trench is also an American-Chinese co-production aimed at family audiences, and, give or take a splash in the final reel, it’s even more bloodless than its predecessor.
It’s not as though anyone was expecting Piranha 3D levels of carnage – though that might have been fun. But what hamstrings Meg 2 even more than its gorelessness are skimpy characters and frenzied editing that makes it hard to work out who’s who and what is killing them, especially when they’re all flailing around in underwater exo-suits.
Coincidentally, one of the best monster movies ever made is getting a 30th-anniversary rerelease. While it may seem unfair to compare Meg 2 to Jurassic Park (released way back in 1993), it’s a reminder that Steven Spielberg has been injecting EC horror-comic grisliness into family fare since Jaws in 1975.
Spielberg’s dinosaur thriller is a masterclass in the deftly choreographed demises of disposable secondary characters, such as the greedy employee whose sabotage has risked everyone getting killed by a Dilophosaurus (ha ha ... yes! hoist by his own petard!) or the lawyer cowering on the toilet who gets chomped by a T rex. We’re encouraged to feel a smidgeon more regret at the deaths of the game warden impressed by raptor stalking tactics (“Clever girl!”) or the chain-smoking engineer who is dismembered offscreen so his severed arm can be served up as a “Gotcha!” moment.
Four years later Spielberg directed The Lost World: Jurassic Park, the first sequel in the franchise, which is similarly studded with brilliantly staged set-pieces. Eddie the engineer refuses to abandon a rescue attempt and ends up a Noble Sacrifice, torn to pieces by Mr and Mrs T rex, and a sadistic hunter gets his just deserts, nibbled to death by Compsognathuses. And it’s at this point that Spielberg starts piling on sick jokes: the squashed corpse stuck to a T rex’s foot, or the death scene featuring David Koepp, the film’s screenwriter, who is billed in the credits as “Unlucky Bastard”.
Something has changed in the interim. The fate of Zara in Colin Trevorrow’s 2015 Jurassic World, snatched by a Pteradon and swallowed by a Mosasaurus, is more cruel than funny. And just when she was planning her wedding! I’ll wager most viewers would have preferred to see the troublesome brats she was babysitting devoured instead. Alas, while children can be jeopardised, they are off limits as dino-fodder.
It is paradoxical that the more sophisticated computer effects have become, the less real the creatures seem. But show me expert timing combined with irony and inventiveness, and even when the monsters themselves look like weightless animation, film fatalities such as Samuel L Jackson’s abrupt departure in Deep Blue Sea, snatched by a shark in the middle of a defiant speech, or Shea Whigham’s botched Noble Sacrifice in attempting to see off a skullcrawler in Kong: Skull Island, will be remembered long after the Meg movies have gone the way of the dinosaur.
