Spoiler alert for The Shallows, The Martian, Gravity, & Cast Away
Steven Spielberg once said that in the best movies someone "loses control [of his/her life] and then somehow has to regain it." Isn't it funny, though, how in certain movies the character has some definitive past trauma which dramatically informs their attempts to regain control? For example, in Gravity Sandra Bullock isn't just an astronaut stranded in space; she's a woman who has lost a child. To get away from truly dealing with that, she's traveled about as far away as any human physically can.
Similarly, in The Shallows Blake Lively's not some random, supermodel-gorgeous surfer attacked by a shark and stranded on a temporary island with a pesky seagull; she's someone who recently lost a mother to cancer. The related trauma caused her to quit medical school and run off to a far away part of the world which had sentimental value for her mom. Her father begs her over phone to honor her mother by fighting rather than quitting, but she tables that conversation for later and paddles out into deceptively dangerous waters. Life (or, more accurately, the screenplay written by Anthony Jaswinski) throws an inciting incident at her (the shark attack) which makes her internal conflict external. Now she has the choice to give up and die or literally fight to survive and honor her mother's memory.
It's very telling that the film does not end when Lively defeats the shark and floats to the shore. It ends after a one year time jump to her standing on a beach with her younger sister, preparing to head out into the ocean where she'll finally teach her sister how to surf. In the year since the attack, her leg has healed, and she has graduated from medical school. She's ready to move forward without fear, unwilling to let the attack deter her from facing the symbolic uncertainty of the ocean with anything other than courage and conviction.
However, Jaswinski's script is actually quite classical in its very basic structure:
- The hook. A boy playing with his soccer ball near a shore comes upon clear evidence of a shark attack: a splintered surfboard and a go-pro adorned helmet with obvious shark bite marks. Flash to one day earlier.
- The backstory. We meet the main character being driven to the beach and learn about her dead mother.
- The inciting incident. The girl is attacked by a shark after investigating a dying whale.
- The midpoint. Two surfers are killed by the shark in front of the girl.
- The crisis. A nearby boat fails to see her flare gun, thus proving to her that there will be no rescue. To survive, she has to kill this damn shark herself, which sets up the final showdown.
- The realization. The one-year time jump to her having finished medical school and heading out into the ocean again, emboldened to always fight and never give up.
But if we don't have that traumatic backstory about her mom then there's not as much emotional engagement with the film because otherwise it really is just some girl fighting a shark. In a survival movie like this, simply surviving is rarely the main thrust of the story for the protagonist. It's what their literal survival will symbolically represent on their journey which matters and resonates with audiences.
Jaswinski's not exactly subtle about it, either. Lively spends most of the film on a temporary island with a seagull which has a clipped wing, its injury mirroring both her physical and emotional state. This seagull becomes her far more real version of Wilson from Cast Away, i.e., the necessary sounding board which allows her inner thoughts to become external.
But think back on The Martian and ask yourself this: By the end of the film, how much do we actually know about Mark Watney? Um, he's an ingenious botanist. Meets adversity head-on with solutions and a positive attitude. Hates disco. Loves his parents enough to create a goodbye video for them should he not make it.
That's about it. He's a likable, genial guy with absolutely no thematically relevant backstory dramatically informing his actions. He is someone who lost control of his life and took it back, but why do we care outside of the basic human decency of not wanting to see a seemingly good person die?
Chuck is a man obsessed with control and time through his job as a systems engineer for FedEx, but his commitment to his job is such that he hasn't yet made the time to marry his long-time girlfriend (Helen Hunt). Once he's on the island, though, as Roger Ebert put it, "Chuck, the time-and-motion man, finds himself in a world without clocks, schedules, or much of a future." The island will either remake him or kill him, and the situation speaks directly to who he is and what he needed to change in his life. His four years on the island ultimately costs him the love of his life, but he'd actually lost her before he was ever cast away because he prioritized work over her. However, he ends the story with a smile on his face, ready to freely embrace any of the endless choices which lie before him, as visualized by him standing at a literal crossroads.
The Shallows has its own degree of competency-porn as well. Lively uses her medical knowledge to treat her wounds as well as the seagull's. She talks herself through it by pretending she's simply treating a patient at a hospital, using a soothing voice to both describe her actions and make assurances that everything will be okay. Moreover, she also proves capable of tracking the high tide and clocking the shark's movements.
We respond to that kind of thing because the fear of being stranded somewhere is so universal we want to see how certain people overcome the odds, and we secretly fear we wouldn't be smart enough to know how to do some of the things these cinematic survivors pull off. But is that a good enough reason to care about someone like Mark Watney over anyone in Gravity, Shallows or Cast Away? The Martian is a movie in which a guy is left behind on Mars, and he uses his botany skills to survive just long enough for his fellow astronauts to return and rescue him, with generous assistance from the brightest minds on earth (e.g., Mackenzie Davis and Donald Glover). Cool. That's great. But who cares? What's the point? What is the emotional baseline our protagonist starts at, and where is he by the end of his journey?
The Martian seems to reject the artificiality of the presumption that the situation should have some thematic resonance to the main character, though. Isn't it more emotionally honest to present a survival story that's simply about some person trying to survive, and how their efforts inspire others to help? Would it really be so bad if The Shallows was just about a girl fighting a shark? Is it maybe just a little too convenient that Chuck Noland is thrust into a situation which throws his entire worldview into chaos? Did Sandra Bullock really have to be a mother who lost a child? Is The Martian somehow more plausible than the more Earth-bound (and one adrift-in-space) survival stories centered around characters with dramatically convenient backstories? In other word, does The Martian seem less-stereotypical Hollywood, and more confident that the mere act of surviving is plenty dramatic enough?
Yes, it does, yet when I left The Martian last year I wanted more of a reason to care about Mark Watney than the jokes he tells, science knowledge he displays and action he inspires in others. The whole plot is basically a simulation of what would happen if NASA lost an astronaut in space, and concludes with a hearty nod toward the triumph of the human spirit and potential for international cooperation. However, because of the cinematic DNA for these kinds of stories I am programmed to expect a reason to care beyond the basic premise of "this person might die." The Shallows gave that to me, and I walked away thinking I had just seen one of the better films of the summer.
What do you think? Let me know in the comments.