Beast of War

I have a weak spot for shark based movies and this was still a big disappointment. For fans of action war movies there is virtually none of that so despite the setting you will be let down. As a horror/shark movie however, well also a letdown. The movie starts with a group of recruits in
boot camp and these scenes for some reason they had them all acting like immature children. Actually the entire movie has them acting unrealistically and a lot of it is so silly it almost wants to be a comedy half the time. It's clear this was made on a very small budget, as all the night scenes are shot very dark and then the day scene conveniently has a thick dense fog bank roll in so you can't see anything. The shark while visually looking very well done they chose to do it with animatronics instead of CG. Normally I'm a fan of minimizing CG, however when doing something like a shark it just doesn't look good. It's painfully obvious it's not real in every shot as the shark is so slow and barely moves at all. There is a big over use of slow motion throughout the entire movie in general. Pretty much all the shark attack scenes are either done in slow motion or are plainly telegraphed and you can see them coming
far before it happens thereby nullifying any sort of scares or tension. They also decided to have the ships faulty air raid siren get stuck in the shark fin giving off a weird sort of screaming sound. This clearly supposed to be terrifying but just comes off as gimmicky and dumb. Now for the woke. The cast consists of a whole bunch of white male's and 1 aboriginal. You know where this is headed. Naturally the DEI is the main character and focus and the only one with any sort of backstory. He is smart, capable, good and all the white females love him. Race is naturally a part of the story with one of the white characters being a huge racist and hating him, and of course all the white characters seem to act like idiots or stupid children. There is another strange thing here that I wasn't going to mention under woke but it seems to be done on purpose so I think it might actually be. The very first scene of the shark
the DEI genius instantly says that it's a female because of it's size and the males don't get as big. This is based on him seeing only the head for about a second in the dark during an attack. All of them then always refer to the shark as 'she'. I may be wrong but it seemed like an odd unrealistic thing that nobody would care about in the moment and forced in just for some kind of gender nonsense.