Many years ago, for reasons I can’t recall, I read Meg: A Novel of Deep Terror by Steve Alten and thought “wow, that was the most transparent pitch for a film rights sale I have ever read, and I cannot wait to see this terrible film about a giant prehistoric shark what eats people.”
And now, friends, we can see it together. WE LIVE IN A GOLDEN AGE.
The Meg stars Jason Statham, Rainn Wilson, Ruby Rose and Li Bingbing among its human stars, and what a gloriously random assortment that is. It also stars a giant CGI shark and a lot of quips.
And now we have this little featurette to “wet” your appetite GEDDIT WET LIKE THE OCEAN WHERE THE MEG IS!
For those not across their paleo-slash-cryptobiology, the megalodon is a now-extinct shark which we know entirely through fossilised teeth – which are, to be clear, massive.
From said teeth scientists have determined that said sharks died out about two and a half million years ago, but both the book and film are based on the premise that a) the megalodon was basically a 75 foot long great white shark (which probably isn’t true; it was probably more like a Mako shark, and topped out at about 60 feet ) and b) that maybe some survived and live in the great untraversed depths of the oceans.
That’s a fun idea, but not the case.
All the evidence is that Megalodons ate prehistoric whales and therefore probably hung around surface coastal waters. In fact, it’s likely that the thing that drove the sharks to extinction was that whales started heading for polar climes.
You know, cold water. Cold water that is still far, far more hospitable than the lightless below-freezing temperatures and crushing pressure between the surface and the warm geothermal vents at the bottom of places like the Marianas Trench.
Also, a big clue that the megalodons died out around that time is that the fossil record shows that suddenly whales got a whole lot bigger – almost like there was no alpha predator from which they had to flee all the time.
But who cares? It’s Jason Statham fighting a shark the size of an airliner. We’re all in.