The trailer I posted earlier today is simply wonderful, but really, how many dozens (hundreds) of times have we been burned by stuff like this? Let’s take a jaundiced eye at the prospects of whether this will live up to even a fraction of its promise.
Reasons to despair:
1) It’s made by Asylum, a firm that doesn’t exactly have a great track record. Their Cloverfield knock-off, for example, was unbearably boring and featured about ten seconds of monster ‘action.’
2) History suggests that the CGI budget for this film is probably exceedingly low. The work here looks decent enough, but the question is, does the trailer give us a significant hunk of every CGI shot in the movie? Is there three or four minutes max of giant monster action, max, surrounded by 86 minutes of Deborah Gibson and Lorenzo Lamas?
3) The film stars Deborah Gibson and Lorenzo Lamas.
4) Specifically, there’s Lamas’ track record in this genre (Raptor Island, the killer shark dud Dark Waters…)
5) A regular problem with these things is the underwater scenes and fights. When there’s nothing to scale the monster against, as in the brief bits of tussling we see, they look just like normal-sized animals.
The good:
1) Hope springs eternal, and it’s a giant shark / octopus film.
2) Whether they had the money to pull it off or not–again, largely a matter of how many minutes of monster stuff they could afford–they at least get the central idea of the genre, which nearly all these *koff* SyFy-style movies miss: Giant monsters have to wreak mass destruction, or there’s not much point to things.
This is why It Came From Beneath the Sea remains the great undersea giant monster movie, because Harryhausen’s wonderful monster quintipus pulls down ships and attacks the Golden Gate Bridge and other feats of oversized mayhem. Say what you will about how ridiculous this trailer’s action looks, the fact is, the monsters are chowing on (again) the Golden Gate Bridge, jet planes both commercial and military, battle ships, etc. They GET IT.
I’m not holding my breath that this will be great, and again, history indicates it will most likely be massively disappointing. If it’s watchable, that will be enough. I guess it comes down to this: If there is seven to ten minutes of monster stuff in the movie, concentrated in scenes long enough to entertain–say, thirty seconds to a minute each–instead of the occasional five-second shot before we go back to Lamas and Gibson, we will be happy viewers. Let’s keep our fingers crossed here.
[By the way, I thought 2002’s Megalodon was fairly decent, certainly compared to the abysmal Shark Hunter or Shark Attack 3 (which I didn’t find as entertaining awful as many). If this is that good, I’ll be well satisfied.]