2003
Directed by Phillip J. Roth
No Air. No Time. No Escape.
Here is a shark movie that I wouldn’t wish on anyone except for the most diehard of diehard shark fans. I do not recommend it at all. So here’s what I am going to do. I’m going to give a complete play by play of Dark Waters, in the hope that it will satisfy any curiosity you may have.
We open with some CGI sharks prowling around in a dark ocean. There’s an exciting musical score to go along with the credits. One of the sharks lunges at a boat from beneath and . . . End credits.
Now we’re on the Gulf of Mexico, at an oil transfer station. There’s two guys repairing something on the outside of the structure, on the ocean floor. Something has attacked the building, and one of the guys is pretty worried. There’s a third guy inside, he’s looking at the radar (when he’s not watching porn, that is). There are five mini subs closing in on his mates. “If they weren’t in formation, I’d say they were great whites, or sperm whales.”
“Great whites?!” Says the scared guy. The other guy tells him to relax.
But you relaxed too soon, my friends, for they are indeed great whites. Let the shark attack commence! But the sharks don’t stop at just eating the two divers, they continue to ram the station until they break it open. The third guy inside dies from lack of oxygen.
Cut to a fundraising summit for Dr. Dane Quatrell’s ‘final phase in his ten year odyssey to discover Atlantis’. A woman introduces him to the audience. His rousing speech is as follows: “Ladies and Gentlemen. Atlantis. The last great adventure. A mystery, wrapped in an enigma, buried deep in the sea. A civilisation that exists somewhere between fantasy and reality. And now each of you can become part of the last great discovery of the millennium.”
So it turns out that the chick who introduced Dane (Robin) and the good doctor himself are a little bit on the desperate side. They have actors publicly pledging lots of money to them and sleep with rich people to get cheques for their research. But what’s this? The women that Dr. Quatrell have seduced are drugging him!
When he wakes up, he’s handcuffed on a speedboat. Some serious guys in black drop him 
off at his dads old marine biology institute, where his partner in crime, Robin, is waiting. She found herself at the institute in similar circumstances.
A business suited man (Summerville) and woman show up and offer Dane and Robin a job. They have files on them and know all about their shady doings. There’s some sort of connection between Summerville and Dane’s father. Anyway, the job offer is dangerous, but too good to refuse.
Flashback from Dane’s childhood when some men killed his father.
Now they’re on a plane. Dane explains a bit about Summerville and his father.
They get into their submarine and head out to sea. The adventurous yet ominous musical score plays again. Queue a tense interaction between Dane and Summerville.
Uh-oh, there’s a big dead grey whale floating in the water. It has what appears to be a massive bite out of it. The crew discuss what to do and eventually just keep moving. Summerville obviously knows something, but hides it.
The sub makes it to it’s destination – the transfer station from the beginning – but only just, it’s at it’s maximum depth. A team go inside the station to check it out. One of the guys notes that two diving suits are missing. “They must have been outside when the attack occurred.” Dane questions why the man would use that word, Summerville is once again evasive. The man finds the third dead guy inside and grabs what they assume to be the surveillance tape. They go back onto the submarine and put on the tape. Of course, it turns out to be the porn that the guy was watching at the beginning. So it’s back into the station we go – more tense interaction between Summerville and Dane.
But there’s something approaching on the radar! Lets all go back to the submarine and check it out!
“What the hell is that?” Dane growls.
The ever helpful Robin (she’s a real know it all) says, “if you ask me, I’d say that’s a coordinated shark attack.”
Dane attacks Summerville and tells him he better start talking. But now’s not the time. The sub is in jeopardy, they need to do . . . stuff, so that it doesn’t . . . something (I’m not great at following that sort of thing – it goes right over my head). Anyway, there’s lots of yelling and rushing around – “It’ll take eight minutes!” “We don’t have eight minutes!” – that sort of thing. Now the sharks start ramming the sub. Summerville gets a fatal wound and dies in Danes arms, effectively cutting off his plot revealing sentence. The three remaining survivors – Dane, Robin and Miklos – make it back into the transfer station in the nick of time. The sub explodes from the shark attack.
Tension, angry tension. Then Miklos spills some interesting information about new CIA weapons and top secret black programs. Turns out Summerville had something to do with the original program – an operation codenamed Dark Waters (sorry that I’m not getting all the sub plot details spot on, guys).
Queue another flashback dream of Danes childhood. Dane wakes up, there’s low oxygen, he passes out. Then when they all wake up, they’re in a mini sub with people who tell them to shut up. When Robin wakes and asks where they are, Dane replies, “I don’t know, but were not dead, cause they aren’t angels.”
The three then get transferred onto a submarine and shoved into a cell. Apparently the submarine is very expensive and high tech and top secret and so Robin and Dane are convinced that they will not make it off alive. Miklos, ever the loyal navy boy, says that the U.S. military doesn’t execute anyone for security reasons. Dane says, “Really? Tell that to my dead father.”
There’s a scene with the sub captain – an actor who appears to be the missing Baldwin brother – that leads to another scene in a secret lab. There’s walkways over a pool, so you can see where this is going. Two guys talk about control problems and a glitch. Obviously, these are some of the guys who created the crazy sharks. Turns out there have been two hundred and eighty deaths. A cover thing is lifted from a giant aquarium and the men look in on two very massive, very docile sharks. The head scientist guy yells that he wants this problem solved.
Jump to our three heroes, who manage to get Robin to escape from their cell through the roof.
When the captain figures out that the survivors from the station have been in contact with Summerville, he orders their deaths. We see Robin dazzling a military guy with her cleavage before beating him up and stealing his weapon.
Three buff guys go to the cell. One of them lies to Dane and Miklos about getting them to the surface. Meanwhile, Robin kills the two guys waiting outside the holding room and then the third guy when he comes out to investigate. Dane is angry that she killed them, but Miklos notices that they have silencers. “These aren’t marine issue, these guys are here to kill us, we gotta get outta here!”
They find some uniforms and pretend to be escorting Robin (who is channelling Marilyn Monroe) around the sub. No one asks why there is some chick getting a tour of a top secret sub because they are under the spell of her cleavage. Anyway, two and two gets put together and everyone figures out that the two guys and girl that were walking freely around are actually the two guys and girl missing from the holding room (to be fair, the people who saw them walking around didn’t even know that there were people in the holding room, but still – why would a ditzy woman be getting a tour of a submerged sub, you know?).
Now there’s some running and gun shooting and our three find themselves near the shark tank. Dane says that they will have to swim for it, Miklos exclaims that this is not Seaworld and Dane tells him that the sharks are probably electronically sedated right now. He guarantees that they will be safe, Miklos guarantees that they will be an afternoon snack! Dane and Robin jump in, followed closely by Miklos. They swim through safely while the sharks completely ignore them.
Jump to the two scientists again. They talk about how after twenty seven years of research, the sharks still cannot be controlled in the open sea. D, R and Mik climb out of the pool and the head researcher tells everyone to get out. He stays in the sealed room with our three heroes and tell then lots of stuff about the research – which is basically using sharks as weapons.
A group of marines work on breaking into the lab while D, R and M grab weapons and prepare for a shoot em up battle. Marines enter, shooting commences, the marines fall back. The captain doesn’t want any lethal force used because the doctor is still in there and it is a five hundred million dollar lab. The marines re-enter, more shooting commences, a marine falls into the shark pool, another marine catches Robin and holds a gun to her head, the doctor opens the steel doors that look into the shark tank and tell all the marines that any gun shots could break the glass. I think he also woke those sharks up because after getting everyone to put down their weapons, he releases them and one of the marines gets eaten when the shark leaps out of the water. Ooh, there’s another shark attack (terrible graphics). Someone shoots the doctor multiple times and then that main buff guy gets attacked by a shark and dragged into the pool.
Dying scene with the doctor, who turns out to be Danes father! He wasn’t killed, Dane, he was just taken to a submarine to do shark weapon research! What a relief. Another clearer flashback confirms this. Oh, and he also put a code into the computer that’s basically going to destroy the lab.
Dane, Robin and Miklos try to find a way to escape. Robin, who knows everything about everything, damages this vital door so that the sub can’t be sealed. They find a mini sub.
The captain and the other researcher discuss what to do, coming up with the idea to release the sharks and recapture them later. They’ve already transferred data, so all they have to do is rebuild the tank.
So the bad guys make their way to the lab, discover the broken door, get locked in, etc, etc. They try to get out but eventually the researcher sits in front of the glass door and claims that he is “getting a front row seat for the apocalypse.”
Meanwhile, the good guys are escaping in the mini sub. The sharks have sine been released. They are getting information on the mini sub screen about nearby sharks, but they don’t see anything!
The main sub is in serious trouble now and the captain is losing it. The researcher tells the captain that the dead doctor well and truly made sure that if he ever wanted his research gone, it would be gone. He cut some wire before he died and the whole sub is going down. The researcher is very calm, he sits back down if font of the tank as we see the glass cracking. Then it breaks open and the water rushes in, killing the researcher and a heap of trapped marines. The submarine blows up.
Back to the mini sub – they are getting rammed by sharks. They chew off the left engine and leave the good guys in – you guessed it – jeopardy! A torpedo launcher is discovered. The sharks chew off the oxygen tank. They release a torpedo, but Miklos (who I should have mentioned was knocked out from a head injury) wakes up and tells them that they only shoot at fixed targets. Dane soaks the blood off of Miklos’s head with Robin’s top (“You’re wearing a bra, just take [your top] off”) and they dangle it through the hatch to attract the sharks. Robin is waiting by the open hatch with a shotgun, ready to kill the shark. She shoots, she kills! The shark falls to the bottom of the ocean, blood pouring out of it, the remaining shark has a little gnaw. They turn the mini sub around and lock in on the feeding shark and kill it with the torpedo.
So the sharks are gone, but the mini sub has lost power. They are sinking, but they’re too deep to swim for it! Miklos has an idea – he gets the inflatable boat and sets it off through the hatch. The mini sub rises to the surface. The three of them wait in the boat for the coast guard to come and get them. Robin is very upset because there is no suntan lotion and the boys used her shirt to attract the shark. She is going to fry!
Another thing I forgot to mention – Dane picked up a key from somewhere – his father, I think – that, in addition to a key he already had, opens up a safety deposit box. Cut to this scene now. Within the safety deposit box is a map of Atlantis. Dane is ecstatic.
Cut to another speech giving scene. The three of them have discovered Atlantis.
Now, we are at Dane’s dad’s marine institute. It is theirs once again! Dane throws the key into the ocean, thanks his father, and the credits roll.
Alright, I definitely had more fun with this movie the second time around. It’s still one of my least favourite shark flicks, but it wasn’t as bad as I remembered.
Trailer here.
My Rating: 1/5 fins
IMDb rating: 3.4/10
His friend Peter gets married to the beautiful Suzy. During their reception, he drinks way too much alcohol – people keep offering him their drinks (some kind of tradition?). Suzy gets Jesu to go and rescue him from all the men who keep plying him with booze and they make their escape. Suzy sings and runs away from her new husband playfully. Peter drunkenly follows her down to the beach. But while she strips down to her slip and goes in for a swim – all the while singing (this is Bollywood, after all) – he stays on the shore, watching her with adoration. Finally, the shark gets good and tired of Suzy’s singing and eats her whole. Yes, the shark is big enough that Suzy kind of just slides into it’s mouth. Peter doesn’t see his beloved bride get eaten, as he is passed out on the shore (why yes, this scene does sound awfully familiar).
Aatank has a two hour running time, which is about an hour too long. But if you fast forward the five or six song and dance numbers, that should drop a good half hour or more from the movie and speed things up. The first shark attack is fifty three minutes in, but those sharkless minutes were actually pretty funny, what with all Jesu’s antics. The second half is better because of the shark attacks, but the non shark bits are more boring than they were in the first half – if that makes sense.
– the shark drags them under the surface and they pop back up comically. Then Jesu slays the shark in a hilarious, unreal fashion. See the pics below if you don’t mind it being spoiled.
for the love of shark movies 