

When the trailer for Jon Turteltaub’s The Meg first dropped, it was met with excitement from those wanting a blockbuster B-movie with Jason Statham punching sharks in the face. Now that The Meg is out, we can see that there’s more: its message about the environment and what we are doing to the world’s shark population.

In The Meg, scientists discover an unexplored world deep beneath the Mariana Trench, hidden by a thermal layer. Once the scientists go down, they increase the temperature of the icy layer, which allows a prehistoric megalodon to escape. Once out, the Meg appears to destroy a couple of fishing boats and a school of sharks.The film wants the audience to think the megalodon did it – an easy answer, right? Marine biologist Minway Zhang – played by Winston Chao – gives a sadder explanation. The sharks were not killed by a prehistoric monster, but by shark poachers who cut the sharks’ fin off and left them to bleed to death – “all for a bowl of soup” as Zhang says, before calling the poachers “monsters”. This is not the type of scene you would expect from a film about Jason Statham punching a giant shark in the face.

The facts, however, don’t lie. In 2017 there were 155 incidents of shark-human “interaction” (five fatal), while 100 million sharks are killed each year by humans. Despite this being a film about a predator that must be destroyed before it devours too many humans, it wants to say something important about our real-life treatment of sharks and the environment.

But wait. Say you just want to see a film with lots of shark-eating-people gore, and not a preachy film. What if you could get both? The beauty of The Meg is that the message doesn’t distract from the shark-punching. In an earlier scene when we are introduced to the crew of the multi-million-dollar underwater research facility, we are casually told that Jaxx Herd (Ruby Rose) used to work with an extremist environmental activist group. While the film doesn’t mention the group “because of legal reasons”, as Jaxx says, the description of their methods as “blowing up Japanese whaler ships” is a rather obvious reference to Sea Shepherd. Is it important to the film? Absolutely not, but it’s a good moment that lets you know the characters care about these creatures.

Plastic beach … The Meg in the shallows. Photograph: Warner Bros

There are dozens of films about killer sharks, but few of them actually take the shark’s side. If you have a dangerous killing machine that can only be stopped after firing multiple gunshots, flamethrowers and spears, you don’t want the audience to root for the shark – unless your film’s titled Sharknado. In The Meg, we quickly understand why the shark must be stopped, even if we – as some of the characters do – want to find a way that doesn’t involve blowing the megalodon up.

Once the film reaches the third act and the meg heads towards a beach on the Sanya bay in the Chinese mainland, the audience may be eager to see some brutal scenes of the shark devouring people. What do they get instead? A lingering shot where the camera dives down into the water and focuses on the amount of trash covering the bottom of the beach, from sunscreen bottles, to underwater glasses, to plain garbage.

Maybe The Meg is trying to have its cake and eat it – neither as fun nor as serious as it could have been. But it is one of the rare killer-shark films that tries to say something about the real-life treatment of sharks and the environment. For a film about Jason Statham punching a giant shark in the face, that’s a massive step forward.