By Kai Curry
NORTHWEST ASIAN WEEKLY
I love the way “Meg 2: The Trench” starts out. Introduce cute, little amphibian dino dogs.. Roll the food chain demonstration as each smaller dino is eaten by an escalating larger dino until—BAM!!!—a meg crashes into the shore, orca-like, and eats everything. The ever memorable intro music to “Under Pressure” by David Bowie and Freddie Mercury sweeps in all sultry and Jason Statham escapes a container on top of a cargo vessel in the middle of the ocean.
Awesome.
“Meg 2” pits eco-warriors, or “eco-freaks” as they are called, against predatory mercenaries (you thought I was gonna say megs, eh?) who just want to make money exploiting our natural resources (gosh, that sounds…real). The earth rapists are represented by two Karens (Sienna Guillory and Skyler Samuels), and an army of muscly dudes headed by incarceration (escapee???) “Montes” (Sergio Peris-Mencheta), who wants revenge on Statham’s character, “Jonas Taylor,” for putting him “in a Manila prison” at some point.
The eco-warriors are a joint American and Chinese team (just like the production companies of the film) consisting of Taylor, a bunch of folks from Meg 1 (“The Meg”), like Mac (Cliff Curtis), DJ (Page Kennedy), who is prepared this time, and Meiying (Shuya Sophia Cai), and their small band of intrepid ocean floor travelers who are now mapping the territory under the thermocline—that layer of hydrogen sulfide between our nice friendly ocean and the dino ocean discovered in “The Meg.” Annoyingly, no matter what underwater, mountaintop, or space realm you go to, there is someone that wants to take advantage of the situation for profit, and the eco-freaks just get in the way, kinda like Captain Paul Watson and the Sea Shepherds.
Jonas Taylor (Jason Statham) has taken on the duties of father for Meiying (Shuya Sophia Cai). (Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures.)
In the middle are the megs—yes, megs, plural—and a host of other extremely wily and ravenous prehistoric sea creatures with crazy tracking skills and bottomless stomachs, who “don’t really have anything to do with anything,” as my spouse succinctly put it, but who provide tons of harassment to the humans as they battle it out.
Like the first “Meg” movie, you get ample big shark thrills, even more I’d say, which was extremely satisfying. I don’t know about the rest of ya’ll, but I can’t get enough of a shark fin popping up out of the water (truth)—but I can get enough of said sharks attacking beachgoers.
Gah. Boring.
Unlike the first “Meg” movie, the Asian dudes don’t die. This time, the son and brother of the Chinese scientists in Meg 1, Jiuming Zhang, played by Jing Wu, is neck and neck with Statham for screen time and hero time. The two are equals with different approaches who both look after Meiying when, incredibly, everyone but Taylor is okay with her having stowed-away onto their Star Wars-level submersibles (I mean, these things can move), cuz you know, she just wants to be seen as a credible scientist at 14 years old cuz like every 14-year-old, she can rattle off dino stats.
Jing Wu as part-time scientist and all-the-time hero Jiuming Zhang. (Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures.)
Taylor is the conservative in this movie (yes, you will at one point see him speeding across the waves on a jet ski with a makeshift harpoon bomb between his teeth, but he’s the conservative); and Zhang is the cavalier explorer who dives into an enclosure with “Haiqi,” the meg they are keeping in captivity to study. Zhang tells no one of his plan because he is sure he and Haiqi have a connection (and/or she obeys his whistle commands, which she…kind of?…does).
Gee, these guys are so science-y.
At first, Zhang’s devil-may-care attitude bugged the shyte out of me. But it grew on me. I mean, why not? We’re not dealing with anything precedent here. Why not take a 14-year-old 25,000 feet under the sea amongst man-eating megalodons for fun? Both “Meg” movies are, of course, wildly campy, and we’re not meant to take any of it seriously. Thank goodness because I cannot take Taylor’s fatherly love for Meiying seriously at all. Bro just does not give off lovey dovey dad vibes no matter how many times he corners Meiying and tells her he loves her. He does give off protective vibes, and I really liked his philosophy that he teaches Meiying in the film:
“We solve the problems one by one. We do what’s in front of us. Then we do the next thing.”
I liked the easy mix of Chinese and English in the movie. That was really welcome. And there is ample humor between DJ and his designer backpack, the ever-cynical Mac, Taylor’s antics, and Zhang’s recklessness. What I didn’t love was that as soon as they were in the water with them, instead of observing them from a fancy schmancy institute on Hainan Island, the megs were “bastards” that needed to be blown up and any protective feelings towards them from these so-called scientists and eco-warriors were gone. Especially unfair, I thought, was the loss of the storyline to do with Haiqi, who we are given to understand has a connection with the humans, but then this connection is only used when it comes in handy. It’s not consistent. Well, she is a shark, yeah, so maybe you can’t have a consistent connection with a shark, but…hear me out.
Wait a minute, who said we were being science-y here? No one. So yeah, I can have a consistent connection with a shark if I want. So can Zhang. So can Meiying, who at the start of the movie goes up to the giant meg in the window and says, “Do you miss your mom?” all empathetic like, then later could not give two shytes about Haiqi, and never mentions her again.
Haiqi breaks out of the enclosure and is seemingly “chasing” Taylor and the rest, along with the other megs she meets up with to breed, presumably (also barely followed up on except to wonder at the end of whether she is pregnant, which is greeted with a “God forbid” instead of “wouldn’t that be cool for science?”). I thought I was all smart and it would turn out that Haiqi was racing to protect Meiying and the others, but nope. At least, if she was, or did, no one cared.
So enjoy. You will get your fill of giant ocean-dwelling monsters and sharp teeth. There will be passing reminders of that submarine of rich people that imploded and of tensions between China and the U.S. that could be resolved so easily if we all banded together like Taylor and Zhang do. But nothing you have to dwell on too long, except megs, so get the hell out of the water.
Publicity stunt for the movie set up on the River Thames in London early August. (Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures.)
Kai can be reached at info@nwasianweekly.com.