First Look at Film Adaptation of MEG starring Jason Statham and a Hungry Megalodon Shark
You think Jaws was crazy, wait till you read the novel Meg by Steve Alten, about this Megalodon shark that’s preying on humans. Think Jurassic Park meets Jaws.
Anway, the Meg movie will star Jason Statham (The Transporter, Fast 8) and Entertainment Weekly gave fanboys a look at both Statham and the shark.
Plot Summart from Wikipedia:
The novel begins in the late Cretaceous, with a herd of Shantungosaurus being attacked by a Tyrannosaurus rex on a shoreline. The Tyrannosaurus rex chases a pair of Shantungosaurus into the sea and gets trapped in the mud. It is swiftly killed by a massive Megalodon.
In 1997, Jonas Taylor is a deep sea diver working for the United States Navy on a top-secret dive in the Mariana Trench. He sees a Megalodon, a massive ancient predator that is believed to be extinct. Because he is the only survivor he is disbelieved. He becomes a paleontologist and tries to prove that the Megalodon is real, but he is still considered a crackpot.
An old friend, Masao Tanaka, asks him to go back and help recover a UNIS (Unmanned Nautical Informational Submersible), which helps predict earthquakes, from the Mariana Trench. Again, they encounter a megalodon in the depths: the species has indeed survived, but is trapped in the Mariana Trench due to the ‘cold water barrier’ (the bottom of the Trench is heated by geothermal ducts, keeping the water warm, but that warmth has limited range and the far colder water above it keeps the sharks trapped there as the cold water would apparently have highly negative effects on the giant sharks unless traversed properly). A white bioluminescent (millions of years of adapting to the darkness of the trench lead to this evolutionary trait) male megalodon attacks them and kills Tanaka’s son D.J. before being entangled in the metal ropes connecting the submarine to the ship, which start dragging the shark up. However, the male shark’s vulnerable state prompts an even larger female megalodon to emerge and attack it, and as the female rips it apart, she is bathed in the shark’s warm blood as she follows the entangled male upwards, the warm flood of liquid keeping the female protected from the cold water long enough for it to reach the warmer surface waters of the ocean, hence unleashing the megalodon anew on the ocean’s ecosystem.
It doesn’t take long for the shark to pick up where it left off after it reaches the surface, as it starts killing and eating whales, and sometimes people, including Jonas’s estranged wife, Maggie. To make matters worse, the female is pregnant and gives birth. Both are tracked, as Taylor and Tanaka wish to capture the creature. They manage to get the mother, but it breaks free and starts attacking boats in the area where it was captured. Taylor manages to kill the mother in the carnage by ramming a submersible down its throat, slicing his way through its inner body, and eventually cutting through its heart before escaping. Jonas also manages to capture the offspring of the meg, ending the novel.
I hear that the novel’s on it’s seventh book already entitled Meg: Generations and will be released 2018.
