Sure, Jason Statham gets to battle a man-eating monster – but his movie also packs warnings about ecological destruction
WARNING: This article contains minor spoilers
When the trailer for Jon Turteltaub’s The Meg first dropped, it was met with excitement from those wanting a blockbuster B-movie with Jason Statham punching sharks in the face. Now that The Meg is out, we can see that there’s more: its message about the environment and what we are doing to the world’s shark population.
In The Meg, scientists discover an unexplored world deep beneath the Mariana Trench, hidden by a thermal layer. Once the scientists go down, they increase the temperature of the icy layer, which allows a prehistoric megalodon to escape. Once out, the Meg appears to destroy a couple of fishing boats and a school of sharks.The film wants the audience to think the megalodon did it – an easy answer, right? Marine biologist Minway Zhang – played by Winston Chao – gives a sadder explanation. The sharks were not killed by a prehistoric monster, but by shark poachers who cut the sharks’ fin off and left them to bleed to death – “all for a bowl of soup” as Zhang says, before calling the poachers “monsters”. This is not the type of scene you would expect from a film about Jason Statham punching a giant shark in the face.
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