Here’s the thing about the 47 Meters Down movies. They’re not very plausible, and the director knows it.
Johannes Roberts is very well aware that getting a bunch of scuba divers into very specific, confined conditions is implausible, and in a new interview with Bloody-Disgusting he explained that calling your shots in the build up, and being self-aware with the audience, is all part of the fun of making a film like 47 Meters Down and 47 Meters Down: Uncaged.
“Of all the things that I’ve done, and I think particularly this movie… I’ve yet to see it with an audience, just to be honest, but it is something to watch with an audience, and it is something to… you know what you’re getting into, and I think it is fun to me,” Roberts explained to us.
“You’re playing with certain things, and you’re playing with where, here we go! It’s a glass bottom boat!” Roberts explains, referring to the scene where it looks like the movie is going to be about a shark attack on a glass bottom boat.
“Nah, actually we’ll go there a different way,” Roberts says, describing the twist. “It is a playful movie in that sense, and setting certain things up that you just know are going to then happen, and then it’s just like, oh god, when is this going to happen, and how, and that kind of stuff? Yeah, it’s definitely playful.”
To put it another way, telling the audience what’s going to happen by filling the first act with warnings about what could potentially happen is a lot like a theme park ride. That’s something Johannes Roberts specifically toyed with in 47 Meters Down: Uncaged.
“To the point even, actually, that the girls in this movie arrive at the glass bottom boat thing, to get on it before they’re taken by their friends, you literally have the kind of ‘Roll up! Roll up! Come on, join the shark ride!’” Roberts said.
“We very much had that in mind that the glass bottom boat thing was a ride at Universal, that mentality. I think that then seeps into the whole movie. They’re roller coaster movies,” he added.
And you can get on that roller coaster right now! Uncaged is in theaters this weekend.
