Deep Blue Sea: A Bigger Fish at 25

In 2024, we are poor in hope for our environmental future, but rich in shark movies. Neither of these conditions held a quarter-century ago, when the sharks had yet to circle with such metaphorical and literal consistency. The Jaws cycle dried up in 1987, with a fourth movie that succeeded only in keeping Michael Caine from accepting his Academy Award, and, per a later, famous Caine quote, financing the construction of a very nice home. No wonder, then, those waters went dormant for most of the 1990s, same as with Superman following Jaws: The Revenge’s fellow class-of-’87 flop fourquel The Quest for Peace. As it turns out, Warner Bros. brought back killer sharks more readily than Superman, with the summer 1999 thriller Deep Blue Sea. In the summer of a new Star Wars, a Julia Roberts/Richard Gere reunion, and more Will Smith, Deep Blue Sea didn’t arrive especially hyped. (Indeed, it placed third during its opening weekend, behind Runaway Bride and the blockbuster expansion of The Blair Witch Project.) No one was particularly expecting Renny Harlin, or anyone else, to make what was, at the time, easily the second-best giant-shark-attack thriller ever.

These sharks are bigger, meaner and smarter than their Jaws ancestors – though perhaps not pettier, given the length one of them goes to track down the Brody family in Jaws: The Revenge. They’ve been made this way thanks to the genetic tinkering of a scientist (Saffron Burrows) hellbent on curing Alzheimer’s. The movie judges her harshly for her recklessness – she is ultimately sacrificed, while the quasi-blue-collar man’s-man played by Tom Jane and the vaguely spiritual comic relief played by LL Cool J are rewarded for their resilience. This is despite the fact that Deep Blue Sea itself has spliced some Jurassic Park DNA into its Jaws lineage: supersized creatures that are more devious than they appear, with a storm offering the opportunity for them to run amok. If augmenting Spielberg with Spielberg doesn’t seem like hubris enough, there’s a touch of Titanic in here, too, as the characters populate a vast undersea facility called Aquatica that threatens to become their tomb.

Even with the disaster-movie peril, relentless sharks and some extra horror-movie gore, Deep Blue Sea is not especially scary. It essentially admits this upfront, with an opening scene that starts like a Jaws sequel, or just a regular slasher movie, with attractive young people partying on a boat and menaced by a shadowy shark before Jane’s character bursts in to save them. So this is going to be an action-thriller, not an exercise in pure terror – and as such, the movie proceeds like clockwork. Just a little over 30 minutes in, one of the sharks pops off, chomps on Stellan Skarsgård and some slow-mo bloodletting begins. Moments later, the creatures leverage the airlifting of Skarsgård’s character into a helicopter explosion that kickstarts the destruction of Aquatica. And it’s almost exactly the hour mark where Samuel L. Jackson’s character gives an intense speech to his fellow survivors, entreating them to pull together…until he’s killed mid-sentence by a shark.

That’s the most famous scene in Deep Blue Sea, and its importance isn’t lost on Renny Harlin, who I spoke with earlier this year about his Strangers reboot. I couldn’t resist asking him about any stray Deep Blue Sea memories on the occasion of the movie’s 25th birthday, and he immediately went to that scene, too: “A lot of people bring up the Sam Jackson death. That was a satisfying thing, because I designed that role for him. We had done Long Kiss Goodnight together, and sworn to work together [again], and I realized I didn’t have a role for him in Deep Blue. Then I came up with this idea that I stole from the original Alien, where Tom Skerritt is the captain of the ship.” Harlin’s hope to use the most movie-famous name in his film for a similar bait-and-switch, which, again, involved some clockwork precision: “We wanted to adjust [the speech] so that it would be just long enough that the audience starts to get a little bit antsy, but not so long that they start groaning or getting up to use the bathroom. And not too short, so that the surprise still works. So it was really a scientific experiment, how to make that speech just long enough. It was one of those super-satisfying moments to be at the premiere or at the back of the theater later on, watching people watch the movie for the first time, and just go like, what?!”

Harlin also credits LL Cool J’s character as helping serve as a beacon of relatability in the midst of a more sci-fi setting than, say, Jaws. “Not to glorify myself in any way,” Harlin says, “but in that movie, my one fear was that the environment is so specific and unusual that it’s going to take away from what’s so great about Jaws – it’s a beach, and everyone goes to the beach. Everything is familiar and relatable. And here we are on some research station in the middle of the ocean, so I was worried about how we would make it relatable. That’s why we created the whole sequence in the kitchen with LL Cool J’s character.” Everyone, he points out, has been in a kitchen. That character, with his cross and just-plain-folks affect, plays a little cornball now, but it subverts the Black-guy-dies-early cliché that movies of this era were still indulging, even when they called it out – and dovetails nicely with how the most famous guy in the movie is a Black guy who dies relatively early.

Deep Blue Sea also features, for better or worse, the first major movie sharks of the CG era, though Harlin thinks of them as something of an afterthought: “We spent $10 million building these mechanical sharks, that were really able to swim and dive and come to the surface. An unbelievable feat, what they were able to design. Then we did, in the end, a little bit of CG work too, and of course now you look at it and you go, oh, that wasn’t so great.”

Great or not (and it does look pretty janky today), it opened the floodgates (or smashed through the shark-proof glass), to the point where shark movies feel like a more viable sub-subgenre (genus: creature feature; species: shark) than ever. In a weird way, Deep Blue Sea became just as influential as Jaws, by illustrating that there were other ways into movie sharks beyond sequelizing the inimitable original. The recent Netflix hit Under Paris, for example, feels a lot more Harlin than Spielberg, as does the recent Meg series. 25 years later, Harlin’s movie isn’t a Jaws-style perfect movie, nor does it boast the same level of shark swoleness that it did in the pre-Meg days. Instead, it stands as one of the best and fleetest expressions of Harlin’s B-movie/A-budget sensibility, and a fitting farewell to his decade making slick popcorn thrillers. Something about it must have stuck with him, too; Harlin is currently at work on Deep Water, another shark-themed, disaster-style thriller. (It even stars Aaron Eckhart, the slightly richer man’s Tom Jane.) After all, as another 1999 movie made clear, there’s always a bigger fish.

Jesse Hassenger is associate movies editor at Paste. He also writes about movies and other pop-culture stuff for a bunch of outlets including A.V. Club, GQ, Decider, the Daily Beast, and SportsAlcohol.com, where he also has a podcast. Following @rockmarooned on Twitter is a great way to find out about what he’s watching or listening to, and which terrifying flavor of Mountain Dew he has most recently consumed.