Saw The Meg last night.
It is not a good film. I would describe it as a "big budget B-movie". It's not a JAWS remake in any sense that I can see - the film is based more closely on Deep Blue Sea, but without anything of the positives of that movie.
Frankly Deep Blue Sea had better writing, a better script, better acting, a more plausible premise, and somehow better special effects despite being made almost 20 years ago.
The premise was, frankly, insultingly stupid. The "where" and "how" of where the shark has been hiding all this time is completely unbelievable, the setup for the shark's introduction makes even less sense, and by the end of the film I was just marveling at how 'paint-by-numbers' this monster movie could be.
You've all probably seen a film or played a video game where the monster's behavior is driven entirely by the script and not by any sense of logic. It's shown to be more than powerful enough to destroy anything in its path - and yet for some reason it simply avoids or fails to kill the protagonist when convenient for the script? That's all over this film. That's almost every scene of this film, in fact.
On the off chance that anyone wants to see this movie I'm going to avoid spoiling it, but there's one scene I want to bring up: near the beginning of the film, shortly before the shark appears, one of the 'rescue' submersibles is attacked by an architeuthis; that is, a giant squid - which for some reason the pilot (played by Li Bingbing) fails to identify as such despite it being larger than her submersible (she describes it as a "huge squid" instead, despite being a oceanographer). Granted this beast is less like a real giant squid and more like a Kraken, but even so - if your sub were suddenly attacked by a squid larger than the sub itself, what would you call it?
The squid wraps its tentacles around her submersible and starts crushing it - and right before it manages to rupture the vehicle, suddenly the shark kills it, and it lets go of her sub. She's eventually forced to flee to the surface and Jason Statham's larger submersible takes over the rescue operation.
The shark killing the giant squid is egregious enough - the squid dies quite suddenly and quietly, without any of the violent jerks we'd expect from having an approximately 40 ton shark slam into it at attack speed - which is what sharks do to prey smaller than they are. The scene is supposed to surprise the audience and make them wonder why the squid suddenly stopped attacking before revealing the shark, but it plays out nothing like how such a scene would really go. The squid attacking the submersible is reasonable in and of itself - squid are surprisingly belligerent, to the point of being cannibalistic, but that's the only realistic bit of this scene.
But no, that's not the worst bit. The worst bit is this: this scene takes place at a location even further down than the bottom of the Mariana's Trench, lower than even the Challenger Deep. The water pressure in the Challenger Deep is approximately 1086 bar, or around 15,750 psi. The film tells us that the submersibles are rated to 12,000 meters, approximately a full kilometer deeper than the known maximum depth of the Deep - that means they are rated to withstand about 1185 bar, or around 17,000 psi. Any submersible attempting such a dive has to be able to withstand that much pressure for extended periods. How exactly could even a giant squid squeeze the sub any harder than the water is already doing?