This October 10th, the ocean becomes a battlefield. A squad of rookie soldiers, lost at sea after their ship is sunk, must face hunger, exhaustion, and their deadliest foe yet: a colossal great white shark. Outnumbered, outmatched, and running out of time, they must turn fear into firepower. Beast of War is a heart-pounding clash of man versus nature, where the only victory is survival.
Kiah Roache-Turner’s clever “Beast of War” opens with a prologue straight out of a traditional war movie about the pain of conflict on innocent young men. We meet a select crew of handsome young guys in training for combat during World War II, an Australian unit that’s learning about never leaving a man behind. They play sports, flirt with nurses, and smile like they don’t know what’s coming.
Two key players define themselves in these early scenes in Will (Joel Nankervis) and Leo (Mark Cole Smith), as the former gets swallowed by a mud pit as the other soldiers race ahead. He would die with a lung full of dirt, but Leo turns back to save him, lauded by his superior for understanding what really makes a soldier. An Aboriginal soldier who has been shaped by trauma and gets a 1/3rd pay compared to his white colleagues, he’s insulted and mocked by the bad boy of the troop, Des Kelly (Sam Delich), but he sticks to his core values no matter the cost. Before you wonder what battle these young men will face in a country that turns Leo into a true hero, all three, and a few other unlucky bastards, end up stranded on a floating piece of metal when the carrier they were on explodes. And then the shark shows up.
Yes, “Beast of War” is a shark movie! At a Fantastic Fest strangely dominated by man vs. nature conflicts in films like “Primate” and “Coyotes,” this is the best of the bunch by some stretch, a lean, tense study in how to tell a largely contained story well. Once this crew is set adrift, bloody and terrified, we don’t leave their side as they’re hunted by a massive killing machine that’s hungry and annoyed that the war has come to its corner of the ocean. The phenomenal first reveal of the shark pays homage to the king of the shark movies, “Jaws,” and the practical effects are remarkably old-fashioned yet effective. There’s something about seeing a giant physical shark mouth breaching the surface in slow motion that Roache-Turner understands. Even if we know it’s fake, we don’t care. We go with the situation.
It helps that Roache-Turner does the work with his human characters to engender sympathy and keep us engaged. Smith is quite good at cutting both a heroic and a human figure. And Roache-Turner playfully defines the rest of his stranded soldiers, including one who has suffered a head injury that’s bad enough that his decision-making becomes a liability. These guys aren’t just chum for the shark movie machine, which is essential to the film’s success. And he adds just enough of his own new ideas to a proven formula to make it feel fresh again. A banshee-esque broken air raid siren is a particularly brilliant touch, especially after it gets attached to the shark’s fin, announcing its presence like a bomber piercing the atmosphere.
It’s also important that KRT is willing to get truly gnarly. Severed limbs and the impact of a grenade on a human body are only two of the things that delineate this from so many “Sharknado” pretenders that don’t really reflect the gore that would come with a shark attack. “Beast of War” is gnarly in all the ways that a shark midnight movie should be.
Lastly, “Beast of War” comes in at a tight 87 minutes, which might not sound like a big deal, but it’s essential to the film’s success. This movie knows what to do and how to do it. It’s as no-nonsense as the soldiers and the underwater killing machine it pits against each other. Shark movie fans, take note. There’s a new must-see in the movie ocean.
This review was filed from the premiere at Fantastic Fest on September 21.
