Twenty 20-Sharks is a chronological survey of shark attack movies. In this entry, we’re going way back to the beginning. Before the beginning, in fact. We’re going all the way back to 1945 with a film about one of the more harrowing true stories to come out of World War II.
The USS Indianapolis was hit by two Japanese torpedoes in the Philippine Sea on July 30, 1945. It sank within fifteen minutes. These days, the ship is famous for two reasons: Primarily, it’s the ship that delivered the atomic bomb known as Little Boy to Tinian Island before it was deployed and dropped on Hiroshima. After the ship sank, survivors drifted in the ocean for four days before being rescued. Many of the men who abandoned ship were then picked off by swarming tiger sharks. Only 316 crewmen survived.
This incident also forms the basis of Robert Shaw’s most gut-wrenching speech from Jaws. In the scene, which you can watch above, Captain Quint tells us he was on that ship when it sank, and watched to his horror as his fellow servicemen were dragged under, one by one. Sailors banded together in the water to stave off shark attacks until they could be rescued several days later. “That was the time I was most frightened,” he says, “Waiting for my turn.”
More than just Quint’s reckoning with the part he played in the bombing of Hiroshima, this scene perfectly conveys his abject fear and utter respect for the killers of the deep. It’s the best scene in the movie. It’s the whole reason I’m doing this series, frankly. And it’s also the reason why I chose the film for this entry: Mario Van Peebles’ 2016 dramatization of those events, USS Indianapolis: Men of Courage.
Less a shark attack movie than a World War II biopic, Men of Courage nevertheless conveys the horror of the situation fairly well. Unfortunately, that’s about the only thing the film does well. It fails in pretty much every conceivable way you could sell this. Is it a thrilling WWII film? No, not really. The attack sequence is harrowing, but all too brief. Is it a compelling Nicolas Cage movie? Nope; Cage leads the ensemble, and turns in as flat a performance as you’ll ever see. And finally, is it a terrifying shark attack movie? Again… No. The sharks are a constant threat, but treated like an inevitability rather than a compelling horror monster. It’s all just so paint-by-numbers.
Let’s back up a bit and try to set the scene. Nicolas Cage stars as Captain Charles McVay III. He’s been given a top secret government assignment to deliver an unknown parcel to the Tinian Naval Base in the Philippine Sea. He doesn’t know, though he suspects, that he’s delivering an atom bomb for use against Japan. McVay is given command of the USS Indianapolis with no naval escort.
Also aboard the ship are a pair of naval crewmen (Matt Lanter, Adam Scott Miller) both pining over the same girl (Emily Tennant) back home. One of them has designs on marrying her, and what he doesn’t know is that the other has already gotten her pregnant. This immediately puts us in Pearl Harbor territory with the needless love triangle of three completely made-up characters. And my criticism of Pearl Harbor also applies here: This was a well-documented incident, which happened to real flesh-and-blood sailors. Why manufacture fictional characters, when honoring the men who actually lived through it would have been far more compelling?
What’s more, Pearl Harbor is itself already a pale imitation of Saving Private Ryan, and I only bring that up because both of those films star Tom Sizemore, who is also in this movie. Sizemore plays McWhorter, one of the chief engineers on the ship, and a close friend to McVay. He’s one of the only people in this movie who appears to be actually trying, God bless him. The other crewman of note here is Theodore, played by Mandela Van Peebles (son of director Mario). Theodore fancies himself a writer, and his notebook of ship observations and prose passages becomes a source of comfort to the other sailors. Not many get a real chance to flex their acting chops in this film, but the scenes between Sizemore and Peebles come off better than most.
Also worth mentioning the one other character of note: Navy pilot Adrian Marks, who ultimately rescued 56 sailors from the water in his seaplane. Marks is played by Deep Blue Sea‘s Tom Jane, which is really the only reason I’m even bringing it up. And since we’re in ‘hey let’s talk about all the connections we can make’ mode, special mention must be made of director Mario Van Peebles, who among other things also co-starred in Jaws: The Revenge.
The middle portion of the film, where varying groups of survivors fend off from bloodthirsty sharks, delivers what little thrills there are here. And I feel kind of nauseous even saying that. It’s one thing for a character in a movie to deliver a monologue about how terrible this experience was. It’s entirely another for a movie to painstakingly recreate that experience. The shark attacks are these sudden bursts of chintzy CGI graphics that take all the gravitas out of the situation.
It’s commendable for wanting to honor the sailors who gave their lives for our country. I’m not about to sit here and complain about Men of Courage for having its heart in the right place. And to wit, we see footage of the actual rescue over the end credits, followed by a montage of photos of the actual crewmen, many of whom survived to tell their stories to the people making the film. That’s perfectly fine.
But producing this film in 2016 in the first place may have been the biggest misstep here. What sets this film apart from films like Saving Private Ryan and Pearl Harbor is that those were made at a time when the celebration of World War II veterans was at its cultural peak. Those movies captured the mood of the country in the late 90s and brought home big box office. They were also able to command huge budgets in order to tell those stories.
Men of Courage, by contrast, came out in a much different cultural and political climate, and bears all the hallmarks of a film produced for nursing homes and doctor’s offices. It was made for a relatively meager $40 million, and looks every penny of it. The lighting and blocking is remarkably flat, with no real sense of scale for the size of the ship, or the isolation of the men stranded at sea. I’ve already mentioned the shark effects look chintzy, but the effects work overall has a very TV movie quality to it1.
There’s no one thing that makes USS Indianapolis: Men of Courage a *bad* movie. It’s more that the film amounts to far less than the sum of its parts. One would expect a film about this incident starring Nicolas Cage and Tom Jane, featuring numerous gruesome shark attacks to be at least exciting. But in trying so hard to honor the memory of the lives lost, and in manufacturing fictional plotlines, the movie seems hellbent on not committing one way or another in any direction that might have resulted in a more interesting movie. It’s not even especially bad in any way worth discussing. It’s just… There it is.
FINAL RATING
1.5 stars (out of 5). S’pretty rough, not gonna lie.
NEXT TIME: The Meg (2018)
- Worth noting that this incident has been made into a film before in the 1991 TV movie Mission of the Shark: The Saga of the U.S.S. Indianapolis. It stars Stacy Keach as Captain McVay, and Pearl Harbor’s Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa as Japanese Commander Hashimoto. Maybe I should’ve watched that one instead? ↩︎
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