Deep Blue Sea, 1999
"Shark Escapes Testing Facility," reads a newspaper headline in the beginning of Renny Harlin's late-nineties eco-horror Deep Blue Sea. This film has it all: shark-splosions, too much slow motion, class commentary, long brain needles, LL Cool J with a bird friend, and a weighty moral dilemma about the value of animal testing. This is all to say, it's a lot of fun. Deep Blue Sea is set in an underwater facility where experiments are being run on sharks with the goal of curing Alzheimer's disease. The movie's logic suggests that shark brain juice might re-ignite dead brain cells in humans. Of course, the experiments are interrupted when the sharks become too smart for their human captors.
Screenwriter Duncan Kennedy came up with the story when after witnessing a real-life shark attack, he was plagued by nightmares about sharks reading his mind (Los Angeles Times, 1999). With his $82 million budget, Harlin wanted to turn Deep Blue Sea into a serious horror endeavor like Jaws, instead of a more "tongue-in-cheek-style" horror film, which were popular at the time (Blair, 1999). I'm not sure Harlin quite achieved this, especially thinking back on funny scenes like the one where Samuel L. Jackson is giving a speech to the crew about how they should keep fighting because he didn't give up when faced with a past avalanche situation, but before finishing his speech, a shark jumps up and eats him whole. The film is riddled with these comedic moments.
Outside if its comedic elements and explosions, Deep Blue Sea's story engages with vivisection (animal testing). The conflict in the film is driven by sharks who are angry because they are being held captive at a facility where they are constantly violated for the sake of science. Together, the sharks coordinate their revenge and attempt to obtain their freedom. According to the film's logic, the sharks were able to coordinate their attack because of their increased brain size, which was artificially mutated by the scientists. In the real world, it is a common myth that brain size is a determinant of intelligence. You've probably heard people say that the reason human animals are so smart is that they have a big brain. Not so. Neanderthals had larger brains than homo sapiens and elephants have brains much larger than both (Alex, 2018). Even by weight ratio, humans don't win at brain size. Our brain is about 2.5% of our body weight, which is the same weight ratio as mice. The brain of a shrew is about 10% of its body weight (Jensen, 2016)! What this means is that factors other than brain size contribute to intelligence (as we view intelligence in our human-centric way).
On top of ideas around animal intelligence, Deep Blue Sea leaves the viewer pondering the practice of vivisection. It follows a long line of films that touch the topic: The Island of Dr. Moreau, Terror is a Man, 28 Days Later, Mimic, etc. Horror is the perfect home for such topics because in the genre it's easier to broach the violent nature of it and what it really means for other-than-human animals:
[Vivisection] can include the administration of drugs, infecting with diseases, poisoning for
toxicity testing, brain damaging, maiming, blinding, and other painful and invasive procedures.
It can, and often does, include protocols that cause severe suffering, such as long-term social
isolation, full-body restraint, electric shocks, withholding of food and water, or repeatedly
breeding and separating infants from mothers (AJP, n.d.).
A truly nasty tradition of human science, vivisection is based on an inequity in consideration, placing the interests of human animals above other-than-human animals. Just like the sharks in Deep Blue Sea seek their freedom from captivity and torture so too do the millions of animals used in laboratories each year. For more on the topic, I recommend checking out the BAFTA-winning short film from 2019 Test Subjects.
References
AJP. “Vivisection.” Animal Justice Project, 13 June 2018, animaljusticeproject.com/vivisection/.
Alex, Bridget. “Neanderthal Brains: Bigger, Not Necessarily Better.” Discover Magazine, Discover Magazine, 21 Sept. 2018, www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/neanderthal-brains-bigger-not-necessarily-better.
Blair, Iain. “'Deep Blue Sea' Strives for Old-Fashioned Horror.” Reading Eagle, 31 July 1999, p. B8.
Jensen, Derrick. The Myth of Human Supremacy. Seven Stories Press, 2016.
Los Angeles Times. “'Blue Sea' Hopes to Be Box-Office Big Fish.” Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles Times, 26 July 1999, www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1999-jul-26-ca-59623-story.html.
