Monster Week: Building a Better Shark
Monster Week has kicked off over at Nuketown and the esteemed Mr. Newquist has posited that Jaws (1975) is the “prototypical modern monster movie.” That’s all well and good, but as terrors of the deep go we here at The Secret Lair feel that Spielberg’s shark lacks a little something; a little something we call Science.1
Now, as Mr. Newquist rightly points out, there is a scientist in Jaws. Richard Dreyfuss portrays one Matt Hooper, an ichthyologist whose expert knowledge of Carcharadon carcharias and its ilk is…well, downright dull. Hooper is strictly a small-s scientist, not at all interested in turning sharks into more efficient killing machines or creating bipedal man-shark hybrids. You know: Science! Instead, Hooper is all about bite radius and feeding habits. Boring!
Nor is the shark any more exciting. Sure, it’s big—maybe even bigger than any great white man has ever encountered—but in the end it’s just a shark, and we can do better. Just ask Dr. Preston King (Jeffrey Combs), who fused human and shark DNA in Hammerhead: Shark Frenzy (2005), or perhaps Dr. Susan McCallister (Saffron Burrows), who genetically enlarged shark brains in Deep Blue Sea (1999); while their motives differed, both doctors used capital-s Science to create deadlier, more dangerous sharks. King’s hybrid shark is bipedal and amphibious, allowing it to kill on land as well as in the water, while McCallister’s sharks can swim backwards and are intelligent enough to kill even Samuel L. Jackson.2
As impressive as these genetically-modified sharks may be, they pale in comparison to the shark-cephalopod hybrid killing machine created by Blue Water Core for the U.S. Navy in Sharktopus (2010). Crossing a shark with an octopus? That’s capital-S Science at its finest.
- You might be more inclined to call it “Mad Science,” but that’s just the sort of judgmental shortsightedness we’ve come to expect from you. [↩]
- Spoiler alert! [↩]
Tags: Monster Week, sharks
It seems like Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus should be on this list, if only because of the kickass name. While the plot apparently involves the critters being thawed from their glacial tombs, that’s likely just a cover story. Because really, what Scientist WOULDN’T want to engineer a smackdown between giant sized megacreatures like this?
As far as Deep Blue Sea goes, I hated it the first time I saw it, but I’ve come to appreciate it for its Big Science Genius and amazingly stupid lines. I love this quote:
Dr. Susan McCallister: “Their brains weren’t large enough to harvest sufficient amounts of the protein complex. So we violated the Harvard Compact. Jim and I used gene therapies to increase their brain mass. A larger brain means more protein. As a side effect the sharks got smarter.”
And she says this like it’s a *surprise*, like she didn’t realize that um, bigger brains on a shark means that your place on the food chain is even more in doubt.
But then again, sometimes you get so caught up in a project you lose sight of, you know, forced evolution and its consequences…
@Ken — There was a fair bit of Science in Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus but it was all directed at finding a way to defeat the titular critters so I excluded it from the list. I do like the theory of a coverup, though; it certainly makes the military’s motive a bit suspect, as it was their testing that drove the whales to suicidally ram the ice wall in the first place.
As for Deep Blue Sea, my love for that movie was instantaneous and unabashed. I loved it the first time I saw it and I’m ever-tempted to pop it into the DVD player at the drop of a hate—alas, it’s just not appropriate for the four-year-old boy who insists on watching television with me during daylight hours. Dr. McCallister is brilliantly stupid, in spite of her very good intentions, and it’s nigh-shocking that she’s not the first or second appetizer for her own sharks.