Two sisters are on a cage dive when the unspeakable happens, leaving them trapped at the bottom of the ocean in shark infested waters, depleting oxygen, and no way to call for help.
Great premises can often be ruined by the inability to pull everything together into a coherent finale, and unfortunately, 47 Meters Down falls victim to this. With a fantastic buildup, a story that’s worthwhile, and a concept that really hooks you in (yes, pun intended) it’s a shame that the film can’t really live up to the setup. One might even say it bit off more than it could chew. I should probably stop with the shark jokes… While it tries to be different, and manages to do so for the most part, it slowly falls into plot issues along the way, eventually falling victim to a terribly cliched fin-ale. You know what? Just feed me to the dam sharks already.
Johannes Roberts does a great job directing. The film looks and plays out wonderfully, based on a script by himself and Ernest Riera, but just like with many single location thriller films set during a tragic turn of events, like Fall, The Ledge, and even 127 Hours, there’s only so long the tension can be kept alive without relying upon stupidity of its lead characters and some rather illogical happenings. By the time the film reaches its conclusion, it’s already overstayed its welcome, and it decides to conclude with one of the weakest and most despised plot twist tropes in all of film, thereby ruining the rest of the film up to that point. And that’s a real shame, because the film does have some rather good moments, but the ending cheapens them to the point of absurdity.
The performances are decent, too. Nobody is going to be winning any awards, but by shark movie standards, Claire Holt and Mandy Moore do a good job giving us relatable and empathetic characters who we want to see survive. Their terror translates really well to the viewer, even as they regularly do things that are logically questionable and unsound. It’s rather disheartening that their performances are primarily made useless by that ending, though. The connections forged with them are infuriatingly rendered pointless for the sake of shock value, abandoning factual basis along the way, as well. Then there’s Matthew Modine, who is very much… well, Matthew Modine.
The effects are fantastic, though. For most of the film, the sharks, despite being CGI, are convincingly realistic and behave in ways that are biologically correct. There’s some really cool sequences of cinematography by Mark Silk, too, and I can honestly say there’s scenes on display here that are very uniquely done. The score by tomandandy is great, as well, but nothing can truly save the film from the script itself.
While it’s full of factual errors and idiot plot moments, 47 Meters Down is a rather solid survival thriller film overall, and one of the better shark films out there in terms of visuals, but not so much in plot. Given the competition it has, though, that’s not giving it much of a compliment.