Under Paris

A movie is not good when you are rooting for the villian. In this case, the shark was my superhero.

First of all, with 50 years of advanced technology, robotics, cgi and advancement in film....that sharks today look less realistic than Jaws? It is insane how fake today's sharks look.

To the story...it follows every cliche, nothing is original here, with scenes and dialogues almost straight out of Jaws or Deep Blue Sea.

Acting is way over-the-top, dialogue consists of screaming or incesseantly yelling someone's name. Sharks are fake looking, about the same level as a Sharknado And you cannot find one person making smart decisions. This is a complete miss.

(Yes, I did spend a while trying to come up with a pun that I hadn't seen before).

As this film was gathering some traction on Twitter across the weekend, I decided that I should give it a go. Having assumed it would be an equivalent to the sort of film "The Asylum" make, I was surprised and interested to see that it was initially not that - though in all honesty it gets there by the end.

Having lost her crew, and husband, to Shark attack, on an expedition to the Pacific garbage patch, Sophia (Berenice Bejo) returns to Paris and works in an aquarium. Three years later she's contacted by an Environmentalist Mika (Lea Leviant) who explains that she's hacked shark tracking technology and that one has made it up the Seine, as far as Paris city centre. With Sophia refusing to help them, Mika and her associate Ben (Nagisa Morimoto) undertake the dive instead, with Mika being arrested. Mika, and later Sophia, try to convince River Patrol of the unlikely interloper, but with the Paris Triathlon imminent, the mayor (Anne Marivin) refuses to consider cancelling.

At the start the film is actually reasonably sensible. The shark is played as a looming threat, foreboding in the background or whipping through frame too quick to get a good look at. There's a clear environmental message, where climate change and sea pollution has changed the shark's natural habitats. Berenice Bejo, who was in "The Artist" is a decent lead and does have some chemistry with impossibly heroic Soldier turned River Police action man Adil, played by Nassim Lyes.

I guess the trouble with the film is that, towards the end it does drift into that 'Asylum' "Sharknado" territory with much more explicit use of the, now painfully cheap-looking, CGI Shark. I write my reviews without spoilers usually, and I'll continue to do so here, but I just don't understand how the ending happens. I liked how spectacular it was but where does the water come from?

You never know with Neflix just how well a film has actually done, but there's a chance from that ending that sequels, or sister films might be forthcoming. I'd hope they'd find a more consistent tone, either way, serious, or campy, to be satisfying. This is neither.

As mentioned above, I actually found this film to be quite entertaining. This film is full of typical shark film clichés; stupid characters, ignorant person in power and strange looking CGI. It had some intriguing elements that stacked this film above the rest of shark films, like The Shallows or The Meg. This film feels a little bit more than a simple rehashing of a survival story. The two main characters have to battle a large, complex shark against the backdrop of Paris. No spoilers, but I would definitely recommend that you watch the entire film until the end for the ultimate conclusion. The characters here are forgettable and, once again, most of them fall easily into the stereotypical roles that people in shark films have to in order for the body count to be higher.

Overall, this film was much better than I anticipated it to be, with the middle dragging out until the tension finally starts to ramp up.

To each his own, I think people are taking this way too seriously forgetting it's just a shark movie.

Me, I love a good stupid movie, I really do and when you couple that with some over the top shark shenanigans, you're usually in for a good time. For the most part I enjoyed Under Paris but I think the movie's biggest problem is it doesn't know whether it wants to be a serious study as to how negatively humanity has affected nature (the Siene river is one of the most polluted rivers in the world) or just a fun action movie a la The Meg. The first half of the movie wants so badly to be Jaws, you can almost hear the theme music playing every time Sophia has a flashback, but once they go into the catacombs and discover Lilith's nest, things veer into the realm of the ridiculous, admittedly the best aspects of the film.

New ideas? No.

Great actors? Nope.

Great CGI? Not bad, not great.

Screenwriters doing their best not to be replaced by AI? Not this time.

Netflix delivering another mediocre production? Yes.

I was hoping to see a great action movie as the french have already shown they can produce, but it's just a long series of palms to forehead thinking there's no way people can be that stupid and just trying to suicide by shark.

I appreciate though the premise of this movie and still hope someday people will fully understand the bad consequences of water pollution although I'm pretty sure giant sharks are not one of those.