The Shallows almost immediately lost me when the main character apologized for being an American. It remained iffy with some out-of-place choppy editing (intermittent slo-mo) in an early surfing sequence — just jarringly awful. However, the film quickly recomposed itself to be visually stunning and suspenseful.
Blake Lively is returning to the beach where her mother went when she was pregnant with Blake. Having not seen Touristas, Hostel, The Ruins, Jaws or basically any movie ever, Blake goes to the remote beach alone. She does not even have a car which might be spotted or reported missing.
She meets up with two locals and they ride the waves. The landscape is beautiful and the surfing — awful editing aside — is great. There is even a fun shot of the shark inside of the cresting wave. I don’t know if it is aquatically accurate, but it is a nice visual.
The guys leave, but she just has to get one last ride in. That is when the trouble starts. Without recapping the obvious, she is attacked by a shark. However, the story does go places I’ve never seen and is never boring. There is a B-story with her father that seems extraneous, but does give texture and closure to the story. It might be a little perfunctory and cliche, but there’s a reason some things become perfunctory and cliche — they work.
Is the ending credible? Is that even an issue? Were the endings of any of the Jaws movies credible, even the first one? Only the book had a credible ending and that was a complete bore.
This is Gravity in the water, but I don’t mean that as an insult. A woman is alone, her companions killed, surrounded by a hostile unbreathable environment, can see home but can’t get to it, makes her way to “islands” of momentary safety grasping at any opportunity to survive, she wins by using her wits, and ends up exhausted on a beach.
Highly recommended.
Bonus points: Blake Lively’s character is a woman rather than the usual immature Hollywood little girl, she is a medical student, she surfs, she clearly takes care of herself, she helped raise her little sister after their mother died, she is confident enough to go to this remote beach alone, she improvises sutures and bandages on a big-ass shark bite, she survives while the men die, she defeats the shark, and after her ordeal, she returns to surfing.
But some delicate snowflakes are saying it is exploitation because she wears a bikini to the beach, and applies sunscreen.
Veterinarian Wilbur Orwell is watching a news report about the parking garage murder that opened the show. He is oblivious to the goop squishing out of the donut [1] onto his white shirt. Should it concern me that there is a nice white bakery carton of pastries on the table? It is breakfast — did someone go all the way to the bakery and bring them home that morning? [2]
The trucker thinks it is a bear. But then 
That night, he checks his arm and finds that the bite has healed already. He then goes into convulsions and turns into a . . . ohhh, I guess it was a werewolf after all. The next morning, the TV news is covering another murder. Well, that seems to be a nightly occurrence, but this time Orwell’s bedroom window is open and he has tracked muddy prints back to his bead. And his wife says he was a “beast” last night.
After his cute assistant Mikayla is attacked, Orwell’s new mad olfactory skillz lead him to the real killer. It is a creative sideways turn, going the extra mile that most TV shows can’t be bothered with. Aided by an excellent set of performances, this turned out to be a great episode. The fact that it is rated 8th out of 13 in the IMDb ratings just further taints the credibility of that list.
“Blonde-bearded” Don Jaime is hanging out with “bright-bandanna-ed Caribs, huge ring-nosed West Indian blacks, and hawk-nosed Spanish soldiery” in a Panama bar where everybody knows your hyphenated 
We join Colonel Ward as he is taking a swig of booze at his desk. He is so drunk he only sees 48 stars on his flag. He is agonizing over men killed and equipment destroyed. They happened under his watch, so he expects to be relieved of his command when the General arrives.
The Martian is taken away to be examined. Ward receives word that the doctors examining him all dropped to the floor in convulsions. Some of the men from the hangar have been affected as have men all over the base. The doctors did determine that the Martian is just an silver ape, with no higher brain functions. Ward makes some pretty good deductions that the Martian was sent here as a living host for viruses that would decimate Earth — germ warfare.
His men continue dying until there are only 13 survivors out of 2,000. When one tries to flee the quarantined base like