'The Meg' Is the Extremely Stupid, Very Fun Shark Movie We All Need

Jaws, the first summer blockbuster, is a perfect movie. The Meg, an upcoming movie about a truly giant Megalodon shark, is not going to be a perfect movie. Based on the first trailer, and having read the book it’s loosely based on, it looks like it’s going to be extremely dumb, and we should all consider ourselves blessed beyond words that we’ll have the opportunity to watch it in theaters this summer.

The Meg is an adaptation of the 1997 pageturner Meg: A Novel of Deep Terror, a novel that begins with a scene where a shark eats a Tyrannosaurus Rex. The bulk of the narrative, though, takes place in the present where Jonas Taylor, here played by Jason Statham, encounters a prehistoric Megalodon during a deep-sea expedition to the Mariana Trench. The giant shark escapes the dark, watery confines where it and its kin had secretly lived since Cretaceous, and begins to swallow beachgoers whole.

The movie appears to be making some changes to the plot of the book, which is fine, because there’s still a 75-foot shark at the center of it. Folks, I loved the Mandy Moore shark movie 47 Meters Down, so there’s no chance that I’m not going to enthusiastically endorse this movie with my dying breath.

Look at this poster:

Li Bingbing, Rainn Wilson, and Ruby Rose are also in the film.

A movie adaptation of the book has been in various stages of development hell since the year the book first came out. It’s taken 20 years, but The Meg will finally feast when the movie comes out on August 10.