The Meg jumps the shark: an action film that delivers a message

Sure, Jason Statham gets to battle a man-eating monster - but his movie also packs warnings about ecological destructionWhen 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. Continue reading...