WWII Shark Attack Survival Thriller Beast of War Leaves Lasting Scars
Fresh out of boot camp and after their ship is sunk by the Japanese, a small cadre of Australian soldiers find themselves adrift somewhere in the Timor Sea. With no way to call for help and stranded on a makeshift raft made up of the floating debris of their former transport vessel, there’s little hope for survival. Battling the elements (including an impenetrable fog), with almost no food, and with enemy planes invisibly circling above, things couldn’t be worse.
Or so this ragtag group thought. A hungry Great White Shark has caught their scent, and it has no intention of leaving them alone.
WWII survival movie where a group of wounded soldiers fight off a Great White Shark? That sounds like my sort of jam. But as much as I might have been in the bag for writer-director Kiah Roache-Turner’s latest genre mashup, Beast of War, before watching, I was still pleasantly surprised to find it to be the Wyrmwood: Road of the Dead and Sting filmmaker’s best motion picture yet. This is a gut-wrenching rollercoaster ride of survival and suspense, and I can’t wait to watch it again.
Roache-Turner makes sure that every cent of what had to be a minimal budget ends up on the screen. The CG that brings the shark to life is immaculate, but so are the lighting, fog, makeup, and water effects that help simulate the feeling of being trapped somewhere in the surrealistic nowhere of the open sea. The raft is a hodgepodge of broken metal sheets, steel barrels, fragments of rope and netting, and broken wooden crates. The whole film continually bobs up and down, generating a disquieting aura of physical and psychological discombobulation that had me wanting to reach for the Dramamine.
As for the emotional center of the story, that involves Leo (Mark Coles Smith), an indigenous soldier with a tragic past who is compelled to protect his shipmates no matter the personal cost — even the ones who badger, belittle, and bully him because of his race. It’s a wonderful performance, full of unyielding restraint and anchored in a calmly indignant composure that bellies a smoldering internal ferocity. Smith gives the picture a multifaceted layer of gravitas that allows Roache-Turner to work in a simmering undercurrent of social commentary that, while not exactly subtle, remains breathlessly compelling nonetheless.
The Ten Little Indians aspect to how each survivor is picked off is admittedly humdrum and obvious. While I get that there had to be a desire to play things as close to the supposedly true story that inspired the film as was possible, there are precious few shocks as to the order in which the soldiers perish. Moreover, there were instances when I felt that Roache-Turner was being inadvertently cruel as far as some of the depictions of these deaths were concerned, playing up the brutality with a crude sensationalism that would have been far more at home in his previous, more exploitive (and aptly grisly) efforts than it is here.
But none of that keeps the film from packing a wallop. There’s this phenomenal sequence where Leo makes a dynamic sprint to snag the remnants of a splintered motorboat, leaping from one piece of floating debris to another as if her were a determined frog springing lily pad to lily pad. It had my heart racing as if I’d just run a 100m sprint. Later on, there’s another where the survivors face down a Japanese Zero that ultimately plays out in eerily similar fashion to a pivotal scene in Passage to Marseille where Humphrey Bogart takes a machine gun to a downed German bomber crew. It’s unsettling, but also marvelous.
Taken as a WWII adventure, Beast of War earns its stripes. As a heroic tale of survival against unfathomable odds, it also comes up aces. Finally, as a tried-and-true entry in the shark attack creature-feature subgenre, while no Jaws (what is), Roache-Turner’s adrenaline-filled opus devilishly sinks its teeth into the viewer and subsequently leaves a suitably nasty scar. There’s blood in the water, and that’s exactly as it should be.
Film Rating: 3 (out of 4)
