THE MEG 2: THE TRENCH (How to Ruin a Franchise) EXPLORED

Hey guys, what’s happening? Niyat here with film comics explained. As requested, today we’ll be exploring The Meg 2: The Trench.

While not a great adaptation, with many of the marine conservation themes and major characters changed or not present, and the main conflict and deep character drama gutted, the first film was a surprise hit that delivered on its promise of Jaws on steroids.

It was a pure creature feature, well aware of how silly it was, with Statham wrestling gargantuan prehistoric sharks, trying to protect his crew from the creatures he had spent his life researching.
Where director Jon Turteltaub excelled was in capturing the enormity of the Megalodon and the undersea environment.

So going into the sequel, helmed by Ben Wheatley, who unlike Turteltaub specialized in grounded drama and terror, I was hoping to see much of the same, archetypal characters making reasonable decisions to deal with the terrifying reality of a Meg appearing in the ocean.

Starring Jason Statham, Cliff Curtis, Wu Jing, Page Kennedy and Shuya Sophia Cai, The Meg 2 picks back up with the adventures of Jonas Taylor and the Mana One research team. But how does it fare compared to the original?

Hey there folks!! My name is Niyat and this channel was created to assist in answering all your questions about Films, Comics, Games and Popular culture in a fun and engaging way!

#themeg #jasonstatham #cliffcurtis

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Disclaimer: I do not own rights to any of the source materials I used in this work, appealing to allowance made for "fair use" purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research, under Copyright Disclaimer Under Section 107 of the Copyright Act 1976.

[SebastienGendron-ukpo]

what always bugged me about these shark movies was that the directors make the sharks out to be these gigantic creatures (which require a ton of food to sustain themselves) but are always chasing tiny prey (usually the protagonist, individual people instead of crowds of people). The first Jaws movie had great execution when it came to suspense and despite all the bloodshed and death, the shark never came off as evil.

[haroldthaf]

You gotta praise Statham for accepting every script that lands in his overall vicinity.

[iceheart]

I didn't see this movie, but if you tell me it ends with Jason Statham driving an exploding car through the shark, I'll believe you.

[Tainted_Human]

I'll never get over how hilarious it is that Jason went on an interview throwing shade at Marvel CGI then went on to fight a CGI prehistoric shark.

[Novikous]

This movie has a bad case of Idiot Ball. When a character holds the idiot ball, it causes irrational behavior for plot contrivence. The ball can be passed from character to character regardless of distance and time.

[pat]

Meg 2 is like sharknado. It embraced its awfulness and trying to outdo itself.

[mirakil]

I really rather enjoyed the movie, but I went in not expecting anything beyond "giant shark action movie 2: electric boogaloo". It filled my expectations quite well.

[TheInfinityzeN]

One thing he didn't comment on is the stupidity of mining rare-earth elements from the bottom of the trench. Despite their name, they are fairly abundant and the term 'rare-earth' is a misnomer because they are not actually scarce. Their value comes from the difficultly of extracting them from ores that contain them. So building a mine for something that is found almost everywhere on the planet in an extremely hostile environment which would make the difficult extraction process almost impossible makes no sense.

[brytonup]

The fact there is NO BLOOD in a shark movie is insane

[chalk-one]

Statham killing the shark with the propeller reminded me of the crocodile death in the Australian film "Rogue". It's essentially the same killing method, shot quite similarly too.

[riotbreaker]

My biggest red flag was seeing a Megalodon eat a Tyrannosaur, two animals that existed 63 Million Years apart. Might as well have had the T. rex eat a Polar Bear.

Realistically, a Megalodon would be pretty tame, as most sharks are today, I'd be much more terrified of Livyatan, the killer whale that hunted Megs. The fact that they weren't used here is a travesty.

[napros]

The only problem with The Meg 2 is the editing bloopers, that no one has bothered to mention. At 1:24 Jason Statham says "I got this", then heads out riding a jet ski, so he takes the 3 harpoons and heads out to face the 3 Megs alone, only problem is he wastes 1 of the harpoons at 1:29:30, now he is down to 2 harpoons. This is where it gets interesting (bad editing). At 1:29:35 the aerial shot shows he has none, then back at water level he has the harpoons again, but wait for the real blooper, at 1:29:58 he still has the 3 harpoons, then at 1:32:54 he only has 1 left. So not only does he take all 3 harpoons, he wastes 1, should be down to 2 but ends up with the full 3, then out of nowhere he has only 1 left (Which is then shot out of his hands by the villain on the speedboat using machine guns). So if they are going to spend so much money on making a film, you would think they would at least make sure when they do the editing, someone would, at least, check it for errors. Nothing like recycling shots that doesn't even make sense (reference to the aerial shot with no harpoons).

[cretaceouscrusader]

The age old question of: "Why is there a vent/gate/door that is big enough for the creature you are trying to contain to escape from in its enclosure?"
- Why not have a bunch of smaller vents to allow water circulation instead of one big Megalodon sized vent.

[jojetparedes]

"Allergic to good decision making..." that just made my day...

[pixiebomb]

That scene with DJ and the survival pack reminds me of LL Cool J in Deep Blue sea for some reason

[hung]

My father doesn’t go to movies, he’s a construction worker, over 55 and only likes westerners. But he enjoys jaws ALOT. So he got into the first Meg and loved it. He went ALONE to this one… went to lunch with him the other day and he made a small comment “ nothing like jaws, even that was worse than jaws 3” if something is as bad as Jaws 3. I couldn’t even imagine

[ashleydickerson]

I held out for years on watching the first movie, only caving in when trailers for the second started coming out. Now I wish I had seen it in theaters and not on just a big screen at home because the shot where the Meg comes out of the shadows behind Meiying is good! Still don’t understand the way it gave me chills, but also put a huge smile on my face😂

[locomotivetrain]

The thing that confused me the most was how Jonas the environmentalist had no issue killing a rare species that they know they co-exist with I was so confused how they humanized a giant monster just to murder the species later on

[greenkoopa]

This isn't a comedy channel but damn you had me rollin with the Arnold memes 🤣🤣🐢

[BlastedOblivion]

I haven't seen Meg 2 but Meg really felt like one of those SyFy channel Friday movies but with a bigger budget.