It’s not quite shark week, but we’re still all in on sharks eating people here at TTSL. I watched this shark v people movie with Lisa and it was pretty fun. It did have a touch of environmentalist gobbledygook, but it was brief enough to ignore. My advice to anyone doing a shark film is to stick to reality: sharks. You don’t need to bring in vampires, werewolves, or climate change to raise the stakes.
There is a category five hurricane that hits a South Carolina town, it breaks the seawall, the town is taken by the sea, and sharks come in to eat everyone. There were some decent tropes to keep the popcorn popping: abusive foster parents, redneck foster kids, a pregnant woman who gives birth, an annoying anxiety-ridden lady who stares at things through the movie and rises mostly to the occasion, and a wise sailor/marine biologist who actually saves the day.
The mean foster parents and some good Samaritans become shark food, but that was about it. I was happy to see the foster parents die, but one of the foster parents was straight up murdered by the foster kids, which made the foster kids less sympathetic to me. Yes, foster dad was a horrible jerk, but there was no reflection on the fact that they killed him. You would’ve thought the abusive foster parent would’ve been well thought of by the director and writer because he was a state subsidized parent. I thought government intervention was supposed to make everything better?
My three big critiques is that there were not enough deaths, some scenes were too bright, and the protagonist did not get to save the day. “Thrash” was low on the body count; it made me wonder if they ran out of money or had to donate half of their money to an NGO. Did it have to be “Sharknado” levels of shark chomping? No, but I think that there were only five deaths in this film and that’s a little light.
The other critique is the lighting; typically, Netflix films are really dark and I don’t mean mood; it’s actually difficult to see. “Thrash” went the other direction and there was clear sunlight in a number of scenes that were supposed to be at night. The director had an environmentalist streak; so, maybe it was purposeful to lower a carbon footprint and use daylight to film? I do not have a good answer because it took me out of the story.
Finally, the anxiety-ridden star, whom I will call Anxious Girl, was more annoying than inspiring. Also the film ended where the Anxious Girl and the pregnant woman needed to be rescued by Anxious Girl’s uncle. I don’t think the writer understood that this was a failure. The Anxious Girl faced her fears and should’ve saved the day, but it was her Uncle, a minor character, who had to save the protagonist and pregnant woman. Was the Anxious Girl annoying? Sure, but she grew as a character and by taking away her chance at true heroism, it made the victory hollow and deflated.
Is the film worth watching? Sure. Like a tinder date missing a left-arm, “Thrash” was all right.
Through the Shattered Lens 