R-Rated 90s Sci-Fi Thriller Somehow Has Better CGI Than Most Movies Today

By Robert Scucci
| Published 22 seconds ago

I’ve been putting it off for a very long time, but I finally revisited 1999’s Deep Blue Sea this past weekend, and I’m so glad I did. The funny thing about movies from this era is that the CGI is pretty terrible because it was relatively new technology, generally speaking. I remember laughing at the creature design when I was 11 years old, but after a few decades of CGI in movies somehow getting exceptionally worse, I was actually impressed by what I saw.

I think Deep Blue Sea’s real charm is its willingness to show us the monster, which is normally the worst thing you can do. Have you seen the Jurassic World movies or Disney’s Haunted Mansion (2023)? The screen is so dark during some sequences that you can’t even see what’s going on half the time, and it’s by design. Bury the CGI in darkness and nobody will notice how bad it is. But here’s the problem: nobody can see what the heck is going on, so everybody loses.

Deep Blue Sea, on the other hand, shows us shark attacks up close, for better or worse. Fortunately, everybody brings their A game to the table, and it never feels like a bunch of actors on a soundstage talking to a green screen. It feels lived in, even if it doesn’t always look like it. The moral here is that if you thought movies like Deep Blue Sea were crappy back in the ’90s because of their visual effects, it’s time to revisit them. They look so much better by comparison when pitted against the crap coming out today.

Let’s Make An Apex Predator Even Smarter, What Could Possibly Go Wrong? 

Oh boy, where do we begin? Deep Blue Sea centers on the idea that shark brain tissue may be the key to curing, or at the very least slowing, the damage caused by Alzheimer’s disease. We’re introduced to doctors Susan McCallister (Saffron Burrows) and Jim Whitlock (Stellan Skarsgard), who are basically trying to play God in their underwater research compound. When one of the sharks escapes and wreaks havoc on the public, Samuel L. Jackson’s Russel Franklin, a corporate executive, is sent down to see what all the hubbub is about.

While visiting, he’s introduced to ex-con shark wrangler Carter Blake (Thomas Jane), marine biologist Janice Higgins (Jacqueline McKenzie), and engineer Tom Scoggins (Michael Rapaport), who are all moments away from watching all hell break loose in the form of a super-intelligent shark destroying the facility and eating anybody who gets in its way. Their one goal is to escape back into the ocean, which would be a terrible outcome because we soon find out that, in order to speed up their research, the scientists genetically engineered the sharks to have larger brains. That means there’s not only instinct behind all those razor-sharp rows of teeth, but advanced intelligence as well.

It wouldn’t be an action thriller without some comic relief, though, and that’s where LL Cool J’s Sherman Dudley comes in. Sherman spends most of his time cooking for the crew, quoting scripture, and getting into verbal spats with his pet parrot. He knows how to make the perfect omelet, and he wants the world to know it more than anything else.

Straight Up Popcorn Spectacle That We Should Fully Embrace

Deep Blue Sea is one of those movies you go into with low expectations thanks to hindsight and the film’s reputation for swinging and missing with its special effects. But even Roger Ebert, who once commented that the sharks looked like cartoons, gave the movie three out of four stars for being an effective thriller. Once the setup is out of the way, the whole thing is basically one action sequence after another in rapid succession, and sometimes that’s all you need from a movie.

The best way to think about Deep Blue Sea is as a big-budget B movie. It’s your standard monster movie survival fare, but with $82 million thrown at it, and it couldn’t be cast more perfectly. While it’s a far cry from Jaws, it still has a lot more going for it than the Sharknado films when it comes to set design and its overall level of seriousness.

Don’t get me wrong, Deep Blue Sea is a fun movie and has plenty of comic relief to go around, but at the end of the day it’s a big-budget sci-fi thriller that holds up shockingly well nearly 30 years after it made its initial splash.

As of this writing, Deep Blue Sea is streaming for free on Tubi.