The Meg - 4K Blu-ray Review

Movie
I’m a sucker for giant shark movies. Hey, I’m a sucker for shark movies in general. Deep Blue Sea is one of my favorite guilty pleasures of all times (it’s the perfect amount of unadulterated cheese mixed with monsters), and there’s been some great movies in the past, as well as some nifty new entries recently as well (The Shallows, Open Water). Now, none of these are Jaws by any stretch of the imagination, but I’m easily entertained by giant sharks hunting and munching humans, so it was an easy sell for me when I heard Steve Alten’s novel “Meg” was coming to film a few years back. It seems that Meg was actually in the works since 1997, but Warner Brother was a little gun shy after how badly Deep Blue Sea bombed financially. Then a few years back Eli Roth (Hostel, Cabin Fever) became attached as the possible director and my interest spiked 10 fold. Roth would have brought a vicious bloody mess to the shark genre (he loves his gore), but for some reason he was forced to drop out around 2015-2016 and Warner Brothers began courting Jon Turtletaub (National Treasure) to direct. Then we heard it was being dropped from R to PG-13 and expectations began to settle. Not to mention the addition of Jason Statham as one of the leads (nothing against Statham, but he’s more suited to movies where he’s beating people up than a shark movie) and we were even more hesitant. Then the trailer drops and I actually became interested again. It looked fun, cheesy, stupid and that’s exactly what we get. A movie about a giant shark running around eating things.

Right off the bat we get a bit of a Deep Blue Sea vibe out there. Jason Statham is Jonas Taylor, an ex deep sea rescue operator who is the only man alive to ever have rescued someone below 10,000 meters. He is forced to abort a rescue in process, leaving a couple of men behind, when someTHING gigantic starts crushing the hull of the sub that he’s in the process of evacuating. Not believed by his superiors, Jonas is let go. Years later a mega billionaire by the name of Morris (Rainn Wilson) sets up a state of the art research facility just above the famed Mariana Trench. His money is fueling an expedition down to the bottom of the trench where they believe that the “bottom” is not actually a bottom at all, but rather a layer of freezing cold gasses that is separating and insulating an even deeper part of the sea world that may house unknown creatures. When the scientists send down an exploratory crew (piloted by Jonas’s ex-wife) they find that their ascertain was correct. There IS a whole new world under that false bottom.

It doesn’t take even a bit of surprise out of the fact that this is not going to end well. Something gigantic smashes up the small exploratory vessel, leaving it stranded 11,000 meters down on the ocean floor. Mr Zhang (Winston Chao), head of the research facility, believes that the only opportunity for success is bringing in the disgraced Jonas. Even though he’s a drunk on the beaches of Thailand, Jonas is the only living person who has ever successfully rescued someone at that depth. Upon arriving at the scene, Jones is able to attempt a rescue, but they make one fatal mistake. Opening a door works both ways, and even though he’s able to rescue the craft, their exit from the gigantic freezing layer of gases allows the monster inside to escape. A Megaladon (you can guess where the title came from), a huge 75 foot prehistoric shark, is now given access to an unsuspecting outside world where the ancient beast can roam and ravage at will.

Yeah, there’s not much more plot than that. Jonas, Zhang and the rest of the crew have to figure out a way to capture and/or kill the beast, and spend the rest of the film hunting it down as the beasts munches and crunches upon unsuspecting civilians. While it’s PG-13 and not the gory monster fest I was hoping for, The Meg happens to be a fun shark movie with all the bad one liners you could hope for, a maniacal rich guy who puts everyone in danger, and Jason Statham glowering at a shark as he rams it with a super fast under water race car (basically Fast and the Furious with sharks). It’s utter cheesy track, but it’s FUN cheesy trash.

The cast is dynamic and fun, with Statham mumbling his lines like he’s getting ready round house kick the shark, Rainn Wilson hamming it up as the “too rich for his own good” entrepreneur, and a hose of other fun side characters. The most important thing when watching The Meg is not to take things too seriously, as the movie obviously doesn’t It’s a giant shark movie with lots of special effects and huge teethed beasts eating people. This is not Jaws, but neither is it meant to be. This is a big summer film meant to have people cheering as the humans hunt down a sea monster and kill it /end story.




Rating:

Rated PG-13 for action/peril, bloody images and some language




4K Video: Video:

The Meg is another film that comes to 4K UHD with a 2K digital intermediate and then given the 4K UHD treatment. The results are typical of these spec’d films, with decent textural upgrades over the Blu-ray, with most of the real bonuses coming from the colors and use of HDR. As I said, the textures and fine details show a moderate jump from the 1080p image, and are usually exceptional across the board. The black levels are deep and inky, though I thought they never fully solidified in some of the under water sequences. That being said, I was actually really impressed at the lack of banding on the disc, as underwater shots are notoriously rough on encodes and introduce banding more often than not. The colors are a bit wonky too, but still lovely to behold thanks to HDR. Some of the shots on the surface on the water are bright and almost overly exposed, while the underwater shots tend to be heavily graded towards the blue end of the spectrum, and maintain a much deeper tone. However, it’s the HDR and colors that really save this disc as comparing against the 1080p disc, the Blu-ray almost appears washed out in comparison. The primaries and deep blues of the ocean are shockingly deep and skin tones appear deeper and more accurate. Darker shots maintain a deeper and darker look without being dim, and the image itself just really seems to “pop” more.







Audio:

The mix is exuberant and filled with all of the bone crunching bass that you could ever want, but what surprised me was how the LFE was not nearly as hot as I expected. It’s there in spades, and it gets deep and loud, but that over cooked hot mix that I was expecting wasn’t there. Instead the track focuses on nuance and ambient immersion to gain the feeling of having a shark swimming around you and hitting from all angles. The directional shifts as the Meg shifts around behind, above and around the viewers is quite amazing if you sit and listen to it. Little sounds like the water lapping at the boat is also quite prominent, as is the oppressive sense of sound isolation at times when Suyen is in the divers cage. Vocals are what one would expect form a blockbuster (I.E., just about flawless), and I can’t find any major problems with the track. The overheads are used perfectly, acting as another sound channel due to the fact that when you’re in the ocean, it’s 360 degree immersion. The shark flits above, behind, and right in front of the sound stage, and this mix is nothing short of delicious.





Extras:

• Chomp On This: The Making Of The Meg
• Creating The Beast
• New Zealand Film Commission












I jokingly referred to The Meg as “a SyFy movie with a bigger budget and better cast” during it’s theatrical run, and I find that it really is rather true. Like Deep Blue Sea, The Meg is a trashy bit of monster movie mayhem that is purely fun on a guilty pleasure level, and done so with lots of booms explosions and big special effects of the blockbuster variety. It’s nothing that special, but it put a smile on my face and Warner’s 4K UHD is a great looking upgrade to the Blu-ray (albeit with the same chintzy special features), so any self respecting shark monster movie lover will get a kick out of it. Definitely a fun watch.



Technical Specifications:

Starring: Jason Statham, Bingbing Li, Rainn Wilson, Cliff Curtis, Winston Chao, Ruby Rose, Page Kennedy, Robert Taylor
Directed by: Jon Turteltaub
Written by: Dean Georgaris, Jon Hoeber, Erich Hoeber, Steve Alten (Based on the book by)
Aspect Ratio: 2.39:1 HEVC
Audio: English: Dolby Atmos (Dolby TrueHD 7.1 Core), English DTS-HD MA 5.1 French, French (Canadian), German, Italian, Spanish, Spanish (Castilian), Czech, Hindi, Hungarian, Polish, Russian, Thai DD 5.1, English DVS
Subtitles: English SDH, French, German SDH, Japanese, Spanish, Arabic, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, Hungarian, Korean, Mandarin (Traditional), Norwegian, Polish, Russian, Swedish, Turkish
Studio: Warner Brothers
Rated: PG-13
Runtime: 114 Minutes
Blu-ray Release Date: November 13th, 2018

It has Jason statham punching a shark with an underwater submersible. How can you go wrong with that?

Glad you liked it Jack. I had fun with it too.