The Meg

Em: 00:00:27

Hi everyone, I'm Em and welcome to verbal diorama, episode 346, the Meg.

This is a podcast that's all about the history and legacy of movies you know and movies you don't. That's going to tell me your story and I'm going to say no. You're going to offer me money and I'm going to say no.

You're going to try to appeal to my better nature, and I'm still gonna say no, because I don't have one. Welcome to Verbal Diorama.

Whether you're a brand new listener to this podcast, whether you're a regular returning listener, thank you so much for being here. Thank you so much for choosing to listen to this podcast. I am so happy to have you here for the history and legacy of the Meg.

And of course, if you are a regular returning listener, thank you so much for continuing to listen and support this podcast. I over the last seven years and now 346 episodes. It genuinely means so much to have your continued support.

And if you are a brand new listener, there are a lot of episodes for you to catch upon and maybe if you do, you will then become a regular returning listener. I've had a week off. I actually went down to London and I went to the podcast show, which was a lot of fun.

And now we're in the month of June, except technically I'm recording this in May, but it is the month of June. And one of the things that I love to do on this podcast specifically is something called KaiJune. I mean, you can kind of guess what it is.

And it's always been a very popular month on this podcast for me especially because I make these episodes, but also for listeners as well, because I love hulking great big monster movies. I also love shark movies. And for me, the dumber the better when it comes to shark movies.

Jaws is of course a classic and I love that movie with all my heart, but I'm also very fond of its cheesy sequels. I love Deep Blue Sea. In fact, there's not many shark movies that I don't enjoy.

And so I remember very well when the MEG was announced and when it was cancelled and then when it was announced and then when it was cancelled. And so I know that this has been A movie that was long in gestation, but.

But this is also a movie that very much knows what it is and fully embraces it as well as a PG13 shark movie can. And so this movie is going to be kicking off Kaijune, which is basically a month of Kaiju movies.

And if you're not aware, Kaiju are basically big monsters. And there are not many movies as big as the Meg. And not many have been tried to be made for 30 years.

But this is one Megalodon movie that refused to die.

Em: 00:03:46

Here's the trailer for the Meg.

Em: 00:06:15

Five years after a tragic deep sea encounter that ended his career, deep sea search and rescue diver Jonas Taylor is called back into action when a research submersible is disabled at the bottom of the Mariana Trench. The crew, including his ex wife, is trapped by a massive creature previously thought to be extinct. A megalodon, a 75 foot prehistoric shark.

As the ancient predator escapes its deep sea thermal prison and heads towards populated waters, Jonas must team up with a group of scientists from the research facility Mana 1 to stop the ultimate apex predator.

Facing impossible odds and his own past trauma, Jonas leads a desperate mission to destroy the Meg before it unleashes a bloodbath on the beaches of China. Let's run through the cast.

We have Jason Statham as Jonas Taylor, Li Bingbing as Suyin Rainn Wilson as Morris, Cliff Curtis as Mac Winston Chow as Zhang, Ruby Rose as Jaxx Page Kennedy as DJ Robert Taylor as Hela Jessica McNamee as Lori, Sophia Cai as Meiying Olafur Dari Olufsen as the Wall and Masi Oka as Toshi.

The Meg has a screenplay by Dean Georgiaris, John Hobart and Eric Hobart, was directed by John Turteltaub and was based on Meg, a novel of deep terror by Steve Alton. Unlike sharks themselves, shark movies are far from endangered.

ts chomping down on people in: 1975

Jaws was both imitable and unique because nothing can top it, not even genetically enhanced sharks like in Deep Blue Sea. It's worth adding at this point that Jaws is episode 106 of this podcast. Jaws 2, Jaws 3D and Jaws the Revenge is a triple.

Episode 224, Anaconda is episode 302, Lake Placid is episode 303, Tremors is episode 41 and Deep Blue Sea is episode 146. As I said, I love big dumb monster movies.

And then there's the notoriously bad mockbuster parodies like Sharknado, Mega Shark versus Giant Octopus and Sand Sharks, made for TV and DVD by studios like the Asylum and basically created to be so bad they're good cult films. Arguably. Whether they are so bad they're good or so bad they're bad is yet to be agreed.

thrillers like open water in: 2003

Unlike the Megalodon, which became extinct about 3.6 million years ago and swam in the Earth's oceans over 23 million years ago. While paleontologists have found examples of fossilized teeth, their bodies were mainly built from cartilage instead of bones.

So cartilage is rarely preserved in the fossil record, making a full Megalodon skeleton difficult, if not impossible to find. This has made its true size a decades long paleontological mystery.

Research estimates that some Megalodons could grow to 50 to 65ft long, and they snacked on animals as large as Orca whales.

Some shark scientists theorized that a natural decrease in prey coinciding with the emergence of the great white shark led to the extinction of the Megalodon. Others proposed that the same warm blooded biology that likely fueled their massive size made them particularly sensitive to environmental changes.

And as we know, there were several climate change and geological events which did things like changed currents, precipitation and also led to the cooling of the oceans. It could mean that a lack of warm water and the expansion of glaciers led to the Megalodons ultimate demise.

But the story of the Meg starts with the novel and its author, Steve Alten. He grew up in Philadelphia and earned degrees in physical education, sports medicine and a doctorate of education.

He struggled to support his family of five, and he decided to pen a novel that he'd been thinking about for years, working late nights and on weekends. I hear you, Steve.

th September: 1996

on to become the book of the: 1996

It was published in July: 1997

The novel follows Dr. Jonas Taylor, a former Navy deep sea submersible pilot turned marine paleontologist who's convinced that the remnant population of Carcharodon Megalodon lurks at the bottom of the Mariana Trench.

The central conceit is that the deepest parts of the ocean are warm enough at the floor due to hydrothermal activity to have sustained a population of Megalodons in in isolation from the surface world. The novel was the first installment in a series of books following Jonas Taylor and his encounters with the titular Megalodon.

ith the sequels The Trench in: 1999

when Jaws hit cinemas in: 1975

In most of those books, there would be a paragraph describing the Megalodon, usually accompanied by a black and white photo of six scientists sitting inside a set of Megalodon jaws.

The image lodged in his imagination for 20 years until a Time magazine article about the Mariana Trench gave him the idea to build a story around the trench and have the Megalodon living within it. Jaws didn't just inspire him thematically, it also helped shape the way he aimed to write his story to be different to Jaws.

He found the opening shark sequence in Jaws genuinely thrilling, but then he found he had to flick through four or five chapters to get to the next thrilling sequence. So he decided when writing Meg that he wasn't going to give readers that experience.

He wanted non stop action piece after action piece with one leading directly into the next. He loved Jaws, but he wanted more literal jaws, more teeth, more shark sequences.

And like many authors, having it be adapted into a movie was a pipe dream at first. But then, as he was nearing publication, it all started to fall into place. For the time being anyway.

ook was even finished in late: 1996

Tom Wheeler was hired to adapt the book, but having decided his script wasn't good enough, the studio hired Geoffrey Boem to write a new draft. And Bohm's script was later rejected for the same reason. But it wasn't just competence that was the issue.

Alton himself was horrified by the creative direction the screenplay was going in, with them famously sticking wings on the shark. It was the last straw for Alton, the literal jump the shark moment. He denounced the adaptation, but that wasn't what got the project halted.

Even setting aside the scripts, the project was doomed institutionally.

on left Hollywood Pictures in: 1997

mance when it was released in: 1999

And if you look closely, there are many similarities between the Meg and Deep Blue Sea.

By: 1999

He sent it out via producer Nick Nunziata, and it landed in front of Hellboy director Guillermo Del Toro, a huge favourite director of this podcast and this podcaster. Del Toro loved the story and championed it among the New Line executives he knew, like Lawrence Gordon and Lloyd Levin.

But Del Toro didn't want to direct it himself, so they subsequently got in touch with Speed and Twister director Jan De Bont and brought him onto the project to direct it instead. New Line Cinema still struggled with the concept of Alten's treatment, feeling that it was too similar to Jurassic park.

And so they then hired Shane Salerno, best known for co writing Armageddon, to rewrite the script. However, Salerno's draft drifted far from the source material, feeling more like Moby Dick once again.

million, but in: 2005

Salerno's script was estimated at $157 million and it could inflate to $200 million. They managed to cut almost $20 million, but it wasn't enough.

New Line eventually cancelled the Meg and a Studio spokesperson blamed the expensive script and the lack of choice of director and producers. Jan de Bont however, called it a completely blown opportunity and blame the studio for the film's demise.

o Alton once again in October: 2007

t for a couple of years until: 2009

anager of gravity pictures in: 2014

Gravity Pictures would handle distribution in China while Warner Brothers would handle the rest of the world.

Gravity Pictures consciously downplayed their involvement with the initial marketing because US China Co Productions had a bit of a bad reputation in the past, especially within China. So they downplayed their involvement on purpose, wanting to emphasize it as a high profile Hollywood big budget monster movie.

Setting it near China made sense geologically too, because although the Mariana Trench wasn't exactly next door to the country, it was within a reasonable distance for a Megalodon to reach Chinese shores. The revival of the MEG as a movie was also partly driven by the renewed appetite in Hollywood for monster movies.

gacy sequel Jurassic World in: 2014

In: 2015

es he left the movie in March: 2016

The well known director of hits like Cool Runnings, While you Were Sleeping and National Treasure and its sequel Book of Secrets. Jon and Erich Hoeber were also brought in to do rewrites on Georgiaris's draft a few months after Turteltaub signed on. So did Jason Statham.

e competed for England in the: 1990

deling contracts during their: 1996

ck and two smoking barrels in: 1998

remake of the Italian job in: 2003

That was a lovely little double episode with the remake, and the original producer Lorenzo de Bonaventura wanted an actor who could be the tough guy but also carry the emotional weight of his own trauma.

s and: 2000

d Jason statham and in August: 2016

And with an original March: 2018

And of course, the Megalodon itself was a fully digital creation across the entire film, with no practical shark elements at all.

The production visual effects supervisor was Adrian Dewet, and the work was distributed across multiple vendors, including Scanline VFX, Sony Pictures, Imageworks, DNEG, ImageEngine, Soho VFX and Weta Workshop. Director John Turteltaub specifically didn't want the MEG to look like a great white shark.

He wanted audiences to immediately know they were not looking at a normal shark. The broad proportions were based on a great white, but the team made significant tweaks.

Despite this, the MEG still has the typical great white shark light belly, which it wouldn't need if it was dwelling in the Mariana Trench.

Scanline VFX had actually been involved with the film for over 10 years by the time it came out, meaning that their design work on the shark predated even Turtle Torb's involvement, which is a direct consequence of the production's long development history, because the studio continued to build the creature through multiple director changes and studio transitions. And of course, when you're talking about a creature that literally no longer exists, you still have to make sure it moves convincingly.

And the central problem was that the closest living reference for a Megalodon is a great white shark, which audiences know instinctively well enough to notice if something doesn't feel right.

The team needed to build a functional anatomical structure that mimicked a great white, but scaled it up to 75ft and give it the right weight and mass to sell its size. They described the Megalodon as a big living soft balloon. On every sharp turn, you needed to see ripples traveling through the body.

And to achieve this, Scanline used Ziva vfx, a physically based muscle and skin simulation tool.

It required building the shark's skeleton anatomically correct as a starting point, and the system would then make muscles and skin move in physically accurate ways, preventing intersections and unnatural folding.

Sony imageworks visual effects supervisor Sue Rowe described the look she was after as that of a thoroughbred racehorse, specifically, the way a racehorse's muscles visibly shudder and ripple, communicating enormous power. The muscle ripple effect was ultimately exaggerated beyond strict realism for dramatic effect.

But one of the most persistent challenges in making a 75 foot prehistoric shark movie is making the shark read as genuinely enormous.

Real underwater footage causes light and detail to drop off after about 10 to 15ft from the camera, which is a significant problem when Your shark is 75 foot long. You can't make every shot a close up. They also found that the MEG alone on screen simply didn't read as 75 foot prehistoric shark.

It only looked like a 75 foot prehistoric shark when it was given context or something else in shot for comparison, such as a small child, a dog or a human adult.

To help establish scale, they also used monster lighting, backlighting the shark when it came close, adding rim light, catching the teeth and then lighting it slightly from underneath.

And lighting would be a core issue in the Mariana Trench, because they needed to find a reason for there to be any light in a place that in reality is in total darkness. And the production solved this through storytelling.

The first submersible launches deployable lights resembling spherical Chinese lanterns, which are tethered to an anchor that descends to the sea floor, so the light hovers 10 to 15ft above it. And this gave the filmmakers a diegetic in world light source to justify illuminating the environment.

But even then, when the MEG does show up at the bottom of the trench, you can hardly see it. And that was a deliberate intent for those early scenes, again paying homage to Jaws and barely showing the creature.

The Mariana Trench itself was an entirely digital creation, handled primarily by DNEG under VFX supervisor Raymond Chen. DNEG used customised procedural tools to populate the vast ocean floor environment and control the amount of haze. Not counting the terrain itself.

There were over 30 different assets that needed to be created, like tube worms, coral jellyfish, fish, spider crabs, isopods, and hydrothermal vents. The vents were scattered procedurally in Houdini, with large cloud simulations coming up from them.

And despite the fact that this is a movie that doesn't really take science very seriously, the VISUFX team did spend significant time researching whether the film's premise was scientifically plausible, studying the deep sea environment and how water behaves at extreme depths. The design of the underwater vehicles aimed for a sense of transparency, to give audiences a realistic window into the undersea world.

But the darkness and pressure couldn't be realistically depicted.

As well as the thermocline, a layer of hydrogen sulfide gas, which creates a barrier that seals off a warm lower section of the trench that is completely invented for this movie. The Mariana Trench is the deepest known part of Earth's oceans.

Located in the western Pacific, it reaches a maximum depth of approximately 36,000ft, which is over 10,900 meters, or over 6.7 miles, at a point called Challenger Deep. It is deeper there than Mount Everest is Tall.

The trench is part of the Pacific Ring of Fire, a tectonically active region where tectonic plates collide, causing subduction, which is of the part where one plate dives beneath the other. The movie suggests that hydrothermal activity has created a previously unknown thermal layer where life like Megalodons can survive.

Despite being located in the tropics, temperatures in the Mariana Trench are near freezing due to its depth and lack of sunlight. The immense pressure and total absence of solar energy means the ambient water temperature at Challenger deep sits around 1 to 4 degrees Celsius.

There is no warm habitable thermal layer sitting beneath a cold thermocline. The trench does have genuine hydrothermal activity, though. Cold seawater in deep cracks within the Earth's crust is heated by cooling.

Magma becomes buoyant and rises to the seafloor, though rather than forming a warm pond, the hot fluid rises like a hot air balloon into the cold ocean, cooling rapidly as it mixes with the frigid surrounding water.

Active hydrothermal vents have been confirmed in the trench at depths greater than 8km, accompanied by large temperature gradients, and these vents do support life.

A typical deep vent consists of layers of microorganisms as well as dense aggregations of amphipods and coat pods which graze on bacteria, with larger animals like crabs, shrimp, gastropods, tube worms and cephalopods preying on those. But the heat is highly localized around the vent openings themselves.

It dissipates almost immediately into the surrounding cold water, rather than creating any kind of stable warm ecosystem at scale.

So the general idea that a thick thermocline of warm water sitting below the cold layer, creating a hidden biosphere warm enough to to sustain a population of 75 foot apex predators for millions of years, just doesn't hold up. If anything, pressure and cold increase uniformly with depth.

A Megalodon sustaining warm pocket at the bottom of the Challenger Deep would require an entirely different ocean physics than we currently have. But then, this is a movie about an extinct 75 foot shark, so I guess we can pull the plug on too much realism.

It's time to segue into the obligatory Keanu reference of this episode. And if you don't know what that is, it's where I try and link every movie that I feature with Keanu Reeves, because he genuinely is the best of men.

And obviously I've already mentioned a very good potential Keanu reference in Speed director Jan de Bond. But I've used Yander Bond a couple of times over this podcast and I do like to try and mix things up a little bit.

So the next best, easiest way to link Keanu to this movie is through Ruby Rose, because Ruby Rose co starred with Keanu in John Wick Chapter two. And can you imagine John Wick taking on a Megalodon? I feel like we all know that John Wick would win, right?

Racy's original version from: 1979

trailer for the meg uses the: 1959

Unfortunately, the movie itself doesn't use beyond the Sea, which is a real shame because it's such a fun song and perfectly encapsulates the dumb fun brilliance of this movie. And that's the biggest point to make about the Meg.

This was always going to be a PG13 popcorn movie rather than an R rated horror thriller, and the marketing leaned into the comedy with taglines like Opening wide and Pleased to eat you and the fun trailer with the aforementioned Bobby Darin song.

Summer movies should be fun silly escapism and the posters also leaned into the links to Jaws with a great white swimming upwards to a lone swimmer and the Meg underneath the shark showing the size difference.

There were even a series of promotional images using photos of beachgoers and swimmers of varying body types with nutrition facts labels next to them with serving size and calories. Apparently an average human human contains 242, 225 calories, just so the Meg knows how many to eat in one sitting.

nd March: 2018

It fell to second in its second week after Crazy Rich Asians topped the box office, but it stayed at second for three weeks and remained in the top 10 for six weeks on its claimed although disputed budget of $130 million. Some estimates say it's more like $178 million.

The MEG grossed $145.5 million domestically, $383.8 million internationally, for a total worldwide gross of $529.3 million. It needed a reported $400 million to break even. It debuted higher than predicted and became the highest grossing movie of Jason Statham's career.

Critically, critics are mixed.

Shall we say Rotten Tomatoes has the meg at a rating of 47% with a consensus of the meg sets audiences up for a good old fashioned B movie creature feature, but it lacks the genre thrills or the cheesy bite to make it worth diving in.

One of my favourite reviews for this movie comes from the observer, where reviewer Wendy Ide gave it three stars out of five and said the film certainly gets its money's worth out of the monster shark.

We get numerous thrilling shots of it hurtling towards the camera with the voracious dead eyed determination of a Kardashian and plenty more of the gaping maws of doom looming up behind unwitting kids and animals, unquote. And dead eyed determination of a Kardashian is a great line. Kudos, Wendy.

to the Trench was released in: 2023

Jonas Taylor also lost another wife in the five years since the first movie.

His romance with Su Yin had turned to marriage and also he'd become widowed, but he remained a father figure for her teenage daughter Meiying and raised her along with Suyin's brother Jiuming. It's somehow even more silly than the first and it's enjoyable enough, but a third Meg film remains in the Trench as of the release of this episode.

And the problem with meg2 the trench was it came out at the same time as Barbenheimer, so possibly didn't do as well as the studio hoped. As I've mentioned, I love dumb fun monster movies and the MEG isn't out here to get its PhD in marine biology.

This is a 75 foot prehistoric shark terrorizing a research station in the middle of the Chinese Ocean that moves on to terrorise a beach full of tourists. There's no more to it than that and that's its charm and brilliance.

And full disclosure, I've never been the biggest Jason Statham fan until he starred in Spy. Genuinely, that movie changed my opinion of him. He was funny, charming and everything you expect.

He a spy comedy and I think it's genuinely one of the best spy comedies. So really I may not have even given the MEG a chance without seeing him in Spy first. But he's so good in this.

He's a great leading man, he's good with the action, he's great in the water, and I love his character's more tender scenes with Meiying. It's not often that macho lead actors are allowed those sorts of sweet interactions with child characters, and their relationship is lovely.

And it of course sets up the romance between Jonas and Suyin, which I also kind of like.

B movie creature feature with: 2010

I do understand the PG13 rating, it is a 12 here in the UK, but I really feel like an unrated cut would be so much fun. The main issue, and the issue that all Sharp movies continue to face and will continue to phase ad infinitum is the unflattering comparison to Jaws.

This is nothing like Jaws, but it does pay homage to it with a little dog being called Pippin, a nod to the dog Pipit in the original Jaws.

There's also nods to Jurassic park in there, as well as Godzilla, because without mankind's hubris and the relatively stupid idea of sending humans to a place never before seen, the Meg would never have escaped the trench in the first place. With this movie and with most movies like this, just don't think about the science and you'll be fine.

Because I even struggled, I started to question while I was watching the movie how the Meg could even survive outside of the Mariana Trench, and I had to stop myself because. Dumb fun monster movie.

But realistically, anything that lives down there with the pressure and no light source simply wouldn't survive near the surface, let alone in shallow waters near a beach. And it would probably have no eyes for Jonas to stab, because why would you need eyes when you live in perpetual pitch black darkness?

Why would it know what Whale Song was? There are no whales in the Mariana Trench, and don't even get me started on how a supposed alcoholic could have the physique of Jason Statham.

Comparisons to the book aren't really worth it because they're wildly different and it's just loosely based on Steve Alten's first book.

A planned opening with a T. Rex that's in the book couldn't be done for this movie due to budget constraints, but if you've seen Meg 2 the Trench, they popped it in there instead There are levels of shark movie.

You have the lower tier Sharknadoes, Mega Shark versus Giant Octopus Shark to Puss, three Headed Shark Attack, sand sharks, basically anything shark based from the asylum. They're there. They exist. You can find fun things to enjoy in them and I certainly have, but they are literally at the bottom of the shark tier list.

Then you've got your mid tier shark movies and this is where the Meg happily sits alongside Deep Blue Sea Various Jaws sequels I still state JAWS 3D is not a bad movie and I won't hear any slander against Jaws the Revenge. Not in this house.

But you've also got movies like Bait Under Paris, the Shallows, which I'll admit was too tense for me to finish watching, so I probably do need to finish that one. At some point I need to put on my big girl pants and watch that movie. But then S tier is just yours. It's always Jaws. It's never not Jaws.

Jaws Remastered and re Released. Jaws is the king of shark movies for a reason, but it's not the biggest shark.

That honor will always be the Megs and that's why it's the perfect start. To Kai Joon, thank you for listening. As always, I would love to hear your thoughts on the Meg.

And as always, thank you for your continued support of this podcast. And if you like this episode on the meg.

As I mentioned, there's a lot of other shark slash creature feature movies that I've done on this podcast before.

Jaws Episode 106 Jaws 2 Jaws 3D Jaws the Revenge Episode 224 Anaconda Episode 302 Lake Placid Episode 303 Tremors Episode 41 Deep Blue Sea Episode 146 and there are other Kaiju movies out there too that are literally just about Kaiju movies. But as I said, it's a genre that I particularly love, so that's why so many episodes exist. But as always, give me feedback.

Let me know what you think for the next episode. Kai Jun continues with the King and I know I said Jaws was king, but this is the literal king.

due out in: 2027

Debuting in: 1933

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Em: 00:45:13

Bye.