Although it has at least managed to climb higher than the zero percent Rotten Tomatoes score that heralded its arrival, Meg 2: The Trench is still on course to wind up as the summer’s worst-reviewed sequel.
It hasn’t been a banner year for blockbuster franchises, but with a current approval rating of only 28 percent, the brainless exercise in banality is nonetheless ranked lower than Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, Fast X, Shazam! Fury of the Gods, and Insidious: The Red Door to name just a few of 2023’s underwhelming follow-ups.
Ben Wheatley directing a $129 million epic that sees Jason Statham battling more than one giant prehistoric shark shouldn’t have turned out to be as interminably dull as it did, but the filmmaker has even implicated the legendary David Attenborough as an accomplice when explaining to Collider how the underwater sections of the film utilized cutting-edge technology pioneered by the team behind the naturalist and environmentalist icon’s recent small screen endeavors.
“The most advanced kind of underwater cameras, as far as we understood, are basically at the studios for Blue Planet, for the BBC show, when they shoot. So that’s just up the road, you know, so we went up the road, and Haris [Zambarloukos, cinematographer] got all these massive domed cameras and all that. So you see in the film where you see above and below the line of shooting, but it doesn’t have that thing where their bodies distort massively underneath the water, it’s all the same thing, and that is something from Blue Planet. They developed the camera that would do that. That was one of the kind of innovations we had on the show.”
Never in a million years – or 65 million years, to be more apt – did anybody think a direct line could be drawn between the iconic 97 year-old broadcaster and a widely-panned fantasy with no chance of matching its predecessor’s half-billion haul at the box office, but here we are.