In the beginning, there was the Word. In the Cretaceous period, there was movement.
This message is declared by the dialogue-free opening sequence of Ben Wheatley’s Meg 2: The Trench. We witness a classic food chain in action: an ancient dragonfly descending to an immaculate beach is eaten by a lizard, which lizard has barely made it onto the unspoiled sand before a strange, dog-like dinosaur (maybe some sort of rauisuchian?) races to turn it to dinner for its bickering clan. The giant carcass over which they feast prefigures the next trophic level, as the camera turns to occupy the position of a stalking hunter whose turn it is to make its own dinner. When we return to the beach banquet, an economical series of shots reveals a tyrannosaurus rex, the Platonic ideal of predators, emerging from the bushes to make short work of its prey. It gets even less time to enjoy its meal, as no sooner has its dominance been established than it is pulled headfirst into the water by the film’s titular foe, as we launch into titles which name the apex predator: the Meg.
This is a tale as old as time (or, 65 million years, at least), but we have reason to suspect that time is out of joint. An actual, Paleogenic megalodon could never have set its jaws on that bustling Cretacean beach. The T-Rex the camera implicitly aligns with is thus eaten by its own future, devoured by a creature that will come to life only after its extinction. In contrast to the nearly automatic operation of the chain of nutrition the scene dutifully charts, Meg 2’s opening shows the chain of history to be much more malleable. Is this a simple confusion of superficially similar geological periods? A deliberate massaging of historical fact for the sake of a striking visual? Or could it be a clue that something more profound is afoot? We know from the first Meg film that the past cannot be relied upon to stay in the past. Perhaps this ongoing sequence should alert us to the fact that the future is just as willing to insert itself where it doesn’t belong.
(Pre)historically, this sequence precedes the events of the New Testament book to which it responds. Where it stands in relation to the Old Testament passage which that book references is more vexed. Does this war of all against all succeed the biblical Genesis, or displace it? And how might that origin respond if what it originates decides it can start again?
If time really is out of joint, what might be born to set it right?
Changing my shape, I feel like an accident
We first find Jonas Taylor in self-made captivity, hiding in a cargo unit on the Kitty Blue freighter. Light pours through makeshift fan windows, covering the available surfaces with shadows that look conspicuously like prison bars. These bars will reappear throughout this sequence - as the corrugations in the container he works himself out of, as a briefly glimpsed sailor’s hat, as an intricately arranged scaffolding - but perhaps most obviously as the bars of an actual cage which houses the parrot who facilitates Jonas’ first encounter with the natural world, and to whom he speaks his first line of the film: a glib injunction to be quiet, lest he throws the cage into the sea.
Parrot and audience alike quickly learn that Jonas has stowed away to gather evidence of corporate pollution - the parrot constituting one of the few human affections in the office of the ship’s captain, now briefly joined by our all-too-human protagonist. The parrot’s cries for help draw the attention of the crew, and Jonas is forced to fight his way off the isolated liner, giving us an early indication of how Jonas’ interactions with nature are going to go: like the ill-fated dinosaurs of the prologue, Jonas will face relentless opposition from every living creature that moves, and the consequences of this opposition will be violent.
The natural question, then, is where Jonas falls on the food chain. Is he closer to the devoured tyrannosaurus, or its devourer? The resolution to his predicament on the Kitty Blue provides an answer of sorts: when Jonas finds himself, in the captain’s words, at the “end of the line”, cornered by his enemies at the ship’s edge, he jumps into the ocean, only to plunge himself, face-first, into the open hatch of an approaching plane.
This plane is piloted by his research unit allies, Mac and Rigas, and its fortuitous timing isn’t accidental - in seeing how Jonas escapes, we are given a retroactive justification for his habit of checking his watch. More relevant even than this immediate and resonant invocation of time’s forward march is the painted mouth and eye-evoking window of the zoomorphized plane - Jonas is practically gobbled up by the jaws of a plane which aligns itself with the sharks we will watch him evade for the rest of the film’s runtime.
His safe passage through the plane’s opening is facilitated by a gripping bar held in his own mouth, and this combination of oddly adorned plane and mechanistic oral fixation might cause us to reflect on the other metal beast from whose belly Jonas has just emerged. After all, this meticulously choreographed opening action sequence has seen Jonas proceed with mechanical efficiency from the heart of the Kitty Blue to its surrounding deep blue sea. Like his biblical near-namesake, Jonas has been rescued from the sea’s expanse by a provident fish. But while that namesake called out in distress when he realised his means of escape, Jonas plunges himself into the awaiting stomach. We could say that Jonas, unlike Jonah, seeks out these beasts and throws himself into their mouths. By enthusiastically emulating the reluctant prophet, resolutely refusing to be eaten while chasing that biological process’ exact preconditions, Jonas might be able to step outside of the food chain entirely.
But that this parallel is not exactly level is made clear by its significant difference: Jonas’ big fish are not living creatures. This difference’s significance becomes easier to digest if we first consider the other evident similarity between Amittai’s son and Meiying’s father. The biblical Jonah lashed out at God for his mercy, his willingness to change his mind and show clemency when the wicked people of Nineveh changed their ways, and our cinematic Jonas has his own unrelenting sense of righteousness. The film first raises this impulse in direct connection with the opening, doubly Jonahic mission, through Jonas’ dry retort that he “abhors lawlessness” when Jiuming challenges his actions on the grounds that their research unit cannot risk accusations of illegality, jokingly implying that the wickedness that ought to come up before us is not his act of infiltration, but the reckless pollution of the corporation he has infiltrated.
But it is this same sense of the dichotomy of right and wrong that motivates Jonas’ pathological unwillingness to credit the possibility, raised by Jiuming’s research, that megs could coexist peacefully with humans. While the opening setpiece establishes Jonas as someone willing, almost to a fault, to swim towards the open mouths of the big fish he has been provided, he cannot conceive of a world where he could learn something from the living, breathing beasts whose bellies he decisively wishes to avoid. When he dismisses Jiuming’s experiments in training a captive meg with the reductive diagnosis “the problem is that it’s a meg and you’re a snack”, we may wonder if it’s really Jonas, and not his trench-dwelling foe, who can see those in front of him as one thing only.
While Jonas’ creative interpretation of the law puts the team’s research at risk, then, his idiosyncratic moral fundamentalism makes him an essential subject for the Oceanic Institute’s studies. Could there be a better vessel for consideration of the human being’s relationship to the natural world than this wilful interrogator who abhors what he interrogates?
The precise contours of Jonas’ role as experimenter and experimentee are sketched in our first explicit view of the unit’s research, a virtuosically filmed sequence in which Jiuming tests the scope of motion available to him in a specially designed “exosuit”, smashing his augmented limbs through concrete blocks in subtle but precise time with Gorillaz’ ‘DARE’, the diegetic backing music to his feat of enhanced strength. That song’s distinctly audible refrain of “it’s coming up” lightly emphasises this scene’s relationship to the later ascension of all manner of ‘its’ from the Mariana Trench, but, even before considering this musical cue, we can observe an obvious connection between Jiuming’s mechanical casing and the metal megalodon proxies that have been the consistent and displaced object of Jonas’ concern.
In this way, the Oceanic Institute’s research - the narrative prime mover of the entire film - unifies the considerations which have until now been disparate. Jiuming and Jonas’ team are using technology to enhance their control of motion and rhythm, to give them access to a scientifically recalcitrant natural world. The parameters of the coming investigation have been established: what follows will be a study in the movement of living creatures as it occurs in time. We could simplify this further and say that the film we are watching is one about action. To simplify again: it is an action film.
Excursus: ‘Into the Dalek’
And in carrying out our study of the film, we can call on Wheatley’s previous experiments in action. A particularly useful point of comparison concerns its own experiment: a 2014 Doctor Who episode which sees the Doctor technologically miniaturised and implanted inside the metal casing of an errant member of the species he has always considered his diametric opposite.
Beyond trivially observing that ‘Into the Dalek’ features the same obsession with overlapping lines that we’ve identified as the visual dragnet closing around Jonas, and the repeated motif of unexpectedly perceptive eyes which we will soon see dominating the world of megs, the Doctor’s Magic School Bus journey has much to teach us about Meg 2’s core concerns with nature.
The Dalek, after all, cannot be straightforwardly understood as animal or machine. The episode explicitly disavows the simple interpretation of Dalek biology which would understand it as a wholly organic mutant encased in a wholly inorganic shell, favouring a productive confusion of the two. When the Doctor, Clara, and a team of anti-Dalek soldiers find themselves inside their enemy, any attempts to distinguish between the natural and manufactured aspects of the Dalek’s inner workings come up short. We see, for instance, the Doctor joking with Clara about the difficulty of separating cables from tentacles, and ambiguously describing the visibly mechanical memory banks as “a supplementary electronic brain”. Biological terminology is grafted onto unlikely technological subjects and the subtly evocative set design calls the classification of any component into question.
Even still, we might maintain that while the Dalek’s artificial and evolved components are difficult to disentangle, they are principally distinct. But this interpretation becomes untenable after the Doctor chastises a soldier for harming what looks like resilient metal casing with an instructive choice of words:
This is a Dalek, not a machine, it’s a perfect analogue of a living being
The word “analogue” would initially seem to indicate that the Dalek is not a living being but a very good imitation of one - a highly sophisticated, imitative machine. But if that were the case, why would the Doctor explicitly tell us that the Dalek is not a machine, implying by corollary that it is something else? And in any case, what distinguishes a “perfect analogue” from the real thing? The Doctor’s implicit position might be that a machine which can become a perfect analogue of a living being is no longer a machine. But when it ceases to be a machine, does it become living, or some other type of being?
What’s revealing about this confused status is how it acts as a mirror image of the position occupied by the Doctor and his associates as they travel through the Dalek. Their origin as living beings seems hard to challenge, but the conditions of their experimental journey require them to undergo a technological process that binds them inextricably to the world of machines. We are taught that the miniaturisation process affects their flesh and blood in this profound way when the Doctor describes the risks of an ineffective procedure, socratically guiding Clara to his conclusion in a witty analogical exchange:
The Doctor: Ever microwaved a lasagne without pricking the film on top?
Clara: It explodes
The Doctor: Don’t be lasagne.
The implication that their whole body will react to the miniaturisation - for better or for worse - and the injunction to disavow the natural state of the food Clara eats paves the way for a critical encounter at the Dalek’s memory banks. As equipment-like Dalek “antibodies” attack the group of explorers, the Doctor tricks one of the soldiers into sacrificing himself for the sake of the group. After the soldier is killed, the Doctor reveals that a small piece of circuitry he had encouraged the soldier to swallow in an act of false hope was simply a “spare power cell” that he can now use to track the dead body as the antibodies clean it away.
Standing inside what the Doctor has called “the belly of the beast”, we witness an intricate rendition of the slippery status of human ontology. From one instant to the next, the soldier goes from a living being to a non-living one - becoming, in essence, a hunk of outdated technology that must be “hoovered” by the antibodies. That the Doctor facilitates this transition through the ingestion of the same power cells which give life to inert machines doubles as an implicit indication of the soldier’s always already questionable organic status and an instance of wry gallows humour.
By the episode’s conclusion, this complex of ambiguities and equivalences comes to indicate another sense in which the Doctor mirrors the Dalek’s nature. As the Doctor attempts to instil a long-term moral lesson in a climactic “eye-to-eye” exchange between his augmented body and the Dalek’s inner mutated form, he is disheartened to learn that the Dalek can only understand him as a vessel for hatred. In another Socratic exchange gone awry, the Dalek answers the Doctor’s season-running question of whether he is “a good man” with the damning alternative that he is “a good Dalek”. Of course, like his scientifically-induced stature, the Doctor’s occupation of the Dalek’s way of being is not immutable: he can return to his usual size and, more ambitiously, to a state of moral grace, just as the Dalek undergoes a complex series of reversals in outlook and operation over the course of the episode. But for this moment, at least, the Doctor finds out more than he might have wished about his status as a being, deep inside a good Dalek.
This extra-internal darkness is prefigured in a rightly lauded early, TARDIS-set scene, which serves as an introduction to Zawe Ashton’s Journey Blue and served at the time of airing as a soft reintroduction to Peter Capaldi’s acerbically inscrutable Doctor, two episodes into his tenure:
On a gorgeously lit set, Ashton and Capaldi combatively exchange euphonous Moffatian dialogue as the camera playfully brings us down and back up through the ship’s levels. That this is the same essential journey the audience of Meg 2 will take nine years later is one of the many unexpected glimpses of the future a time travel programme can be expected to deliver.
But as that audience will soon learn, where Wheatley’s action corpus is concerned, the fundamentally revealing force of time cannot always be trusted to show us what we want to see.
Facts are useless in emergencies
And a large portion of this action happens in the Trench of the film’s title.
Jonas and his companions guide the audience into the Mariana Trench in a pair of souped-up submersibles dispatched from the Mana One base. In justifying her decision to stowaway on board, Jonas and Jiuming’s adoptive daughter Meiying informs us of the ships’ abundant resources, and some lavishly realised external shots inform us of their aesthetic debt to the survival tech of 2001: A Space Odyssey’s Bowman et al. The ships’ front and sides are composed of large porthole windows, their angles distorting any front-on views of the team and visually reflecting, in garish, oversized parody, the pinprick eyes of the megs under observation.
The long way down to this observation serves as an opportunity for Wheatley to unobtrusively introduce the unpredictable editing style that is his trademark, used sparingly in this film but present with unnerving intensity as the crew explores the Trench. We are eased in by some exhilaratingly unanticipated cuts between team members in each of the submersibles and, later, between our researching subjects and the submarine control centre of the illegal mining operation they uncover. The uneasy effect created by this sleight of hand makes it appear as if the descent into the Trench - and the megalodon attacks it ultimately provokes - have caused time to slip out of shape. The depth-plumbing explorers traverse eddies and ebbs, as an affect without obvious cause unsettles their observers.
Of course, the jagged, hard-nosed cutting becomes most evident when things really fall apart, and the calibrated expedition gives way to a life-or-death struggle at the Trench’s bottom. When Montes, the face of the illegal seafloor activity, detonates a controlled explosion to hide incriminating evidence, Jonas and Jiuming lose their hold on the dive and crash to the Mariana’s deepest bed. They are now forced to walk to the safety of the underwater mining base in their bodily-enhancing exosuits, in a move that Jonas describes as “going dark”.
So it’s surprising that they find an abundance of light in the Trench. The team treks through all manner of iridescent flora and fauna - christened “light, courtesy of mother nature” by Jiuming - which, while hostile to close investigation, fulfil the fundamentally benevolent function we tend to associate with luminescence. These brightening beings provide the researchers with a much-needed breather and provide us with yet another opportunity to consider how and why these explorers interact with nature. But it’s when this bioillumination fails them, and they are forced to walk in the darkness Jonas predicted, that light really becomes important. Jiuming announces that the team are going to be “totally exposed”, and we begin to be directed towards this sequence’s preoccupations - preoccupations which perhaps originated before and behind the camera.
As the hour comes round at last and the non-illuminating inhabitants of the Trench attack, we are provided with a potent symbolic development. Despite Jonas’ advice to “shoot anything that moves” it is ultimately not gunfire but the light of Jiuming’s flare that saves the team by first repelling the rauisuchians resurrected from the prologue and then diverting the attracted megs. What seems to be revealed to us in these moments is the many uses these beings on film can find for the fundamental technological basis of film itself: light.
If the Mana One team have descended into the Trench to investigate their technologically-mediated engagement with natural phenomena, it’s not surprising that the medium in which they find themselves gets put under the microscope. For what is the film camera, reliant above all else on the appropriation and manipulation of light, if not the ultimate mediator of the natural world? On a surface level, we can observe that the intricately rendered visual effects provide us with media which bring the long-extinct megalodon to light and life, but this sequence also insists that the human subjects in front of our eyes could not be before us absent the illuminating presence of the camera. Like the exosuits that lengthen the scientists’ strides, Wheatley’s camera enhances and enlarges our heroes’ movements. Film, Meg 2 announces, is the medium of action.
But as they enter the safety of an eye-shaped airlock, Curtis’ gruesome death by the implosion of her own exosuit makes clear that the machines which can drag our bodies out of the dark run the risk of exerting too much pressure. How can a director possibly respond if the medium by which they reshape the world threatens to reshape them in its own image? Could they disavow the very technological means that have brought them to this end? And what would such a disavowal cost?
It is Jonas who tests these possibilities on Wheatley’s behalf. After the conspiracy to sabotage the Mana One operation for rare Earth metals has been revealed and the team have been threatened by a deliberate flooding of their underwater shelter, Jonas is forced to visit the Trench without his exosuit, making himself naturally impervious to pressure by inhaling water before he leaves the airlock.
In this moment, Jonas becomes totally self-sufficient. Rigas compares him to a fish who doesn’t need a metal suit and a sly cut from a meg overhead to the ark-less Jonas below seems to compare him to the biggest fish of all. It is no coincidence that this investigation of complete independence sees Wheatley’s glitchy editing style give way at last to its logical endpoint by cutting to black. It is as if Jonas’ exhibition has convinced the camera that it is no longer necessary.
But the temptation to return to pleasant insufficiency is belied by Jonas’ mantra, partially recited back to him by Meiying before he undertakes the weight of the Trench:
We work the problems one by one. We do what’s in front of us, then we do the next thing.
Like his director, Jonas is compulsive in his examination of what’s in front of him, and so what must be outside of himself. That he returns almost immediately to reliance on his team and technology as the crew “light up the station” to distract the megs as they ascend from the Trench tells us everything we need to know about his nature.
The parallel to his external examiner is reinforced by the hand-to-hand battle he is forced to fight with Montes as he makes his way back to the researchers who will help him see the light. Having lost his gun in the Trench, Jonas draws on all manner of technological debris to fashion makeshift weapons which level the field with Montes. His choices (which include, inter alia, canisters of compressed air, loose chains, and a right-angled pickaxe) are symbolic in their own right, but their greater symbolic effect is in taking us back to the opening on the Kitty Blue. There, Jonas gathered photographic evidence of the destruction of the natural world and the film presented us with his original weapon: a camera.
Earlier, we described Jonas as a wilful interrogator who abhors what he interrogates. This is a fitting description for a director who has made his name in psychological horror, filming the abhorrent with a famously probing camera. At this point in their careers, director and diver alike must come to terms with their inevitable subjects and choose whether to love the abhorrent or exist outside of it. Guided only by the beauty of their weapons, this will be a tough call to make.
Still waiting
And they are not the first to make it. Early in the film’s third act, Mana One’s newly combat-ready technical engineer, DJ, delivers what may be the defining line of the analysis to come:
That was some unfortunate shit back there
Just what is “back there” has been at issue since the film’s first shot, and Meg 2’s denouement provides an opportunity to consider the relationship between two plausible candidates.
The first unfortunate origin is distinctively human and is invoked by an odious erstwhile tourist as he argues with an unseen associate on the phone. Decrying their willingness to interrupt his holiday, he asks a deeply unoriginal question:
Who does that? Who ruins paradise for other people?
Genesis provides a readymade pair of answers - the first inhabitants of Eden, and the creator who forced them to go East. The myth which undergirds the origin of the human species can be understood primarily as one which recounts the ruining of paradise for the other people who now wander the Earth.
And that this myth requires the intervention of a nefarious animal - one which ends up on its belly, no less - gives us the (a)historical precedent for the second unfortunate origin, represented by the ancient inhabitants of the Trench who displace themselves in time to wreak conclusive havoc. A breach in the protective thermocline layer allows the great sea monsters, led by a trio of beached megs, to come ashore to the ironically misnamed Fun Island so that what we witness in this final act is the future defending itself from the shit of its past - just as this past comes to terms with the alternative origin it shares.
Naturally, the megs are indifferent to the people who become their snacks, but a key statement is made by the central characters who meet their maker at the jaws of the big fish: Jess and Montes, the co-executors of the plot to sabotage Mana One’s research whose relationship is revealed to have a romantic dimension moments before Jess’ untimely death. This critical couple’s casualty’s significance is reinforced by other kills that get highlighted in this bloody closing section: the paddling partners devoured by a meg near the shore, the badly-timed proposer on a boat upended by killer octopus, the lascivious paradise-ruer smashed to death by tentacle. With the exception of the bottom-feeding rauisuchians, who pick off the remains of isolated billionaires and atomised mercenaries, all of the rising beasts seem obsessed with removing all traces of sexuality and companionship from Fun Island.
Upon entering the Trench, Jiuming realised that the megs were experiencing their mating season, and here we can imagine the surfaced sharks and their tentacled bedfellows reacting to their relational being by lashing out against its equivalent on human shores. While the megalodons epitomise murderous self-sufficiency in their individual units, they remain obstinately mortal, post-lapsarian beings. Their species can only continue through its later members, marking a point where their independent armour is improperly joined. In their attacks, then, the megs seem to make the claim that something fundamental to the reproductive necessity of collaboration is abhorrent to them. It is as if these deep sea dwellers are paradoxically unable to accept the meaningful trench in which they find themselves - the one shared by all living creatures who have inherited the legacy of those who ruined paradise.
While the impotent Jonah and his Stathamite descendent were enraged by God’s merciful discretion, the insatiable megalodons take issue with his indiscriminate wrath. What the megs never consider, though, is that these could be one and the same. That God’s wrath could itself be merciful, and that the fallen state could contain within it moments of ascendance.
This is why, for all that they encircle each other throughout the film, Jonas cannot be seriously compared to the megs. For he is endlessly willing to depend upon and be dependable for his step-daughter Meiying and so is capable of bringing his independent self into meaningful interaction with the demands of the world around him. While the megs might approve of the nature of his unconventional family, which sees him co-parenting with Jiuming in a unit which sidesteps the sexual reproduction they despise, Jonas and Jiuming’s practical engagement with their family is anathema to prehistoric individualism. We saw this in the series of events that led Jonas to become his own exosuit as the team were challenged in the Trench: Jonas acted fully independently only after offering himself up to the sabeoteurs, willingly providing his life for Meiying’s as the harsh light of Rigas’ gun trained itself on his heart.
It takes a man simultaneously self-annihilatingly empathic and yet incapable of seeing the common ground between species to show the megs that they were always already in the trench of insufficiency, even before they were cast out from paradise. Even the top of the food chain is a part of it - T-Rexes need rauisuchians to devour, who in turn need their devourers to provide bounteous corpses. So too are the megs only ever possessed of the illusion of independence, an illusion which their very nature has always threatened to unveil.
Thus while Jonas might seem to reach a natural conclusion as he takes arms against his sea of troubles by attacking the megs alone with his self-made harpoons - clasping the bars of the cage which has contained him since the beginning and wielding them freely against the guards of his real prison - his position as the megs’ convex mirror prevents him from finishing his story solo. Re-teaming with Jiuming and Mac, who have been utilising the powers of light and sound to fend off rauisuchian threats, Jonas both saves his friends and is saved by them as he uses the broken spoke their crashed chopper has provided to spear a gigantic meg in the film’s clearest straight line of all. In this second coming-to-account, Jonas’ most useful enhancement is not the damaged chopper that gets reappropriated as a meg-killing machine but the teammates who tee up his victory - not responding to but reciprocating his wilful expression of the urgency of action.
That his final spear is an obsolete piece of technology, effective only as it is moved by a group of living bodies, is a visual underlining of the verbal realisation Jonas comes to in his final encounter with Montes. Tying us back to his escape from the Kitty Blue, Montes tells Jonas that he has reached the “end of the line”. But rather than jumping into a new terror to carry him from the old one, Jonas holds his own, tossing away his gadget-rigged gun with an acknowledgement that he “won’t be needing this”. Letting a megalodon do its work - trusting for the first time the enemy he has never been able to look in the eye - Jonas watches as Montes takes his inevitable place as the meg’s “chum”. And when Jiuming ensures a safe conclusion by coaxing the only named meg away from the shore, we are given an indication that Jonas has learned from his own teachings. His joky scepticism assures us that he has not fully broken his essentialist habits, but it also leaves him as an imperfect analogue of his biblical antecedent, refusing to accept a definitive answer to the final question he is posed.
And director and audience are mutually educated in tandem. For Jonas’ conclusion implies that the abhorrent ought not be abhorred, providing as it does the occasion for upward movement. This breach in the thermocline means the camera was and is safe to interrogate the trench in which its enhancing questions will always be subordinate to the collaborative demands of its answerers. Back on dry land, our subjects prepare a liquid feast as we pan out from the debris-strewn beach in a near equivalent of our opening dive into Cretacecean ecology. This time, the animals we observe are still. From on high, our unseen director prepares us for our fade to black. First, let there be light.