After three weeks and 46 movies worth of mostly very serious film-watching at the London Film Festival, it’s nice to get a cinematic comedown from something big, dumb, bloody, and fun, and that’s exactly what Kiah Roache-Turner’s Australian World War 2 shark horror Beast of War delivers. A tight, efficient, and gruesome tale of men at sea facing off against a psychotic apex predator, it might not reinvent any wheels or be pushing for any best of the year lists, but it knows exactly what it is, and there’s a real, underrated value in that.
Set in 1942, we follow an Aussie squadron who, after the obligatory ‘making friends and enemies in basic training’ sequence, get shipped off to fight the Japanese, only for their ship to be sunk by a torpedo, leaving the handful of survivors stranded in the middle of the ocean with a hungry great white between them and the one surviving motorboat. Led by the popular and capable Leo (Mark Coles Smith), the only soldier among them of Aboriginal heritage and who has his own history with sharks, the crew is pure archetype. There’s the slightly wimpy sidekick, the tech whiz, the racist lout who finds humility in extremis, and then the collection of the already wounded and obviously first to be eaten.
I don’t think there’s a single moment in Beast of War that actually *surprised* me, from the order of deaths to the ultra-familiar (but still effectively charming) war-buddies humour, but Roache-Turner manages to ratchet up the tension despite this predictability. The shark is a monstrous menace – like all good movie villain animals, it has a great sense of when would be the worst possible time to show up – and creates an enjoyably nasty vicious circle: the more men it kills, the bloodier their raft becomes, so the more it comes back.
Just as the men battle the elements and the shark, Roache-Turner is clearly battling heavy budgetary constraints here, most evident in the shark itself looking *very* fake whenever it’s on screen for an extended time, but his solutions are mostly elegant. He shrouds the film in a thick, sickly fog, punctuated by the occasional blasts of surreal colour, which keeps the focus limited while adding a sense of purgatorial atmosphere to this aquatic middle of nowhere. If you’re looking for something excitingly fresh, Beast of War will not fit that bill, but if you just want one of the year’s purest examples of turn-your-brain-off cinematic entertainment, it’ll do very nicely.
Jack Blackwell – Film Reviews 