Hell, the only reason it is even remembered at all is because of Sam Jackson's fantastic demise and the movie's mastery of The Art of the Great Movie Death. Whatever Game of Thrones' other virtues and successes, its deaths will remain one of the things we'll all immediately think of upon mention of the show or books. Morbid as it may be, it's obvious that we - as audiences - love a good fictional death. We still get those sucker-punches thanks to TV shows like Game of Thrones and The Walking Dead - the last bastions of significant pop culture death - but the Grim Reaper's scythe in cinema has long abandoned doling out the kind of rigor mortis that creates water-cooler conversations.Īnd it's a shame. Jackson's toothy death is the kind of glorious sucker-punch we've been deprived of for a long time, one that leaves us metaphorically wheezing with surprise, smiling our stupid faces off at having been caught so completely off guard. It's like the last waltz of a bygone era when even a mediocre CGI shark B-movie understood what makes a great movie death, and knew how to pull it off. It makes Deep Blue Sea seem practically nostalgic, maybe even (unfortunately) archaic. Thanks to mega-budget superhero movies and summer blockbusters like The Avengers, Man of Steel, and Godzilla, we're now prone to remember movie deaths less in terms of individuals, and more in terms of the name of cities: New York, Metropolis, San Francisco. Most significantly, death has shifted increasingly from an individual scale to a massive one via the rampaging trend of cities being obliterated by monsters, robots, or superheroes - leaving us to imagine the thousands of faceless people left behind in the rubble. Jackson in Captain America: The Winter Soldier - are now either "killed" then resurrected (as I wrote about elsewhere), or - like Kevin Costner in Man of Steel, or Bryan Cranston in Godzilla - killed with little impact on characters, stakes, or audiences. It's just taken on different (and inert) forms. Not many candidates surface because Hollywood is no longer in the business of creating pop culture deaths worth remembering, at least in theaters, though they've drifted to TV. Ask yourself: What movie death has had the kind of emotional or shocking impact to propel it into pop culture awareness? Something like the death of Mufasa, Obi-Wan Kenobi, Thelma and Louise? Maybe Ellie in Up? Josh Brolin in No Country for Old Men? Those are hardly what you'd call popcorn movies, let alone deaths that come quickly to mind. It's become a relic of something that's vanished from the cinematic landscape: a popcorn movie death that matters. What is surprising is that, looking back, the scene represents something far more unexpected. It was everything a popcorn movie death should be: thrillingly unexpected, morbidly fun, and dramatically stakes-changing.įifteen years later, it's not surprising that these are all the same reasons why it's still worthy of its lofty status in the annals of cinematic mortalities. Upon Deep Blue Sea's release in 1999, this marked one of the greatest movie deaths of all time. Then, just in case you don't believe Deep Blue Sea is really killing off its biggest star, Sam Jackson is unceremoniously ripped in half. Without an ounce of second-guessing, he commands, "First, we're going to seal off." and that's precisely when an über-shark suddenly leaps up out of a pool behind him, seizes him in its lethal jaws, and - in a flurry of bad CGI - pulls him into the ocean. The music swells, and the camera pushes in on him, until we crescendo in a close-up of Jackson - bug-eyed, nostrils flared, mouth formed into a righteous megaphone - hitting the apex of his speech. The kind of speech that will rally the troops, and assert him as the natural leader who will see (mostly) everyone through to the end. His voice builds slowly, then suddenly, into Ezekiel 25:17 fury, and starts to deliver a quintessential "We're going to make it" inspirational movie speech. Jackson begins a monologue riff on Robert Shaw's Jaws USS Indianapolis speech, laden with gloriously over-polished B-movie dialogue ("Nature can be lethal, but it doesn't hold a candle to man"). Silence falls, and what's best called a Movie Moment begins. He yells "Enough!" in that distinct "Shut the fk up!" way he's mastered so well over his 40-plus-year career. Jackson, standing in a wetsuit, isn't having any of it. The motley crew of people with him are, understandably, panicking and turning on each other. Thanks, naturally, to a bunch of genetically modified poindexter sharks. A little less than an hour into Deep Blue Sea, 15 years old this week, his character, Russell Franklin, has just been stranded in a rapidly flooding underwater research station.
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