In 1942, the HMAS Armidale cast off from Darwin, the capital city of Australia’s Northern Territory, for Betano Bay in East Timor, charged with evacuating stranded Aussie and Dutch soldiers, plus a number of Portuguese civilians, and dropping off a replacement platoon.
On Dec. 1, Japanese bombers attacked the Armidale in concert and sank it, killing many onboard, save for 49 lucky souls who miraculously survived the bombing, the elements, and the sharks swimming under the Timor Sea’s waves, treating the injured and the dead alike as their personal buffet.
It’s a terrifying thought to imagine oneself floating in open water with nothing on the horizon line but even more open water, and nothing beneath the surface but roving apex predators comprising tens of thousands of pounds of teeth, muscle, and hunger. What could be scarier than a shiver of sharks? Australian filmmaker Kiah Roache-Turner has the shocking answer: one shark.
Roache-Turner’s new movie, Beast of War, dips its toes in the confluence where world history and film history meet, being both inspired by the grim chronicle of the Armidale, and in tune with horror cinema’s “killer shark” niche.
Broadly, these movies orbit sharks flying swimming solo and functioning effectively as aquatic slashers, replacing masked psychos with a carnivore’s blank, remorseless stare, and machetes (and chainsaws, and cleavers) with a maw outfitted with rows of dentine daggers.
Stephen Spielberg’s Jaws reigns supreme over every other shark movie made from 1975 to now, of course, because to dethrone a god-emperor is an impossible task; nonetheless, generations of directors inspired by his genre-defining masterpiece have produced a canon of strong (if distant) runners up, from Great White to The Shallows to this year’s Dangerous Animals.
Beast of War intrinsically understands the Jaws effect as a layered phenomenon.
Yes, Spielberg made audiences afraid to go into the water; yes, that fear lingers to this very day. But Jaws strikes viewers with thalassophobia in part because, counterintuitively enough, a shark gone stag is infinitely more frightening than a shark with an entourage; hanging out with the boys, sharks lose all their sneak attack value and the air of sinister mystery enjoyed by the shark who grew up eating alone in the school cafeteria. Beast of War sees the difference. Maybe a biopic about the Armidale would make a compelling edge-of-your-seat drama; Roache-Turner isn’t interested in that story. He’s interested in the shark.
Better than that, he’s invested in it. On average, contemporary shark films rely on CGI and other such visual trickeries to bring their Selachimorpha to life; even the ones that use footage of bona fide sharks must resort to editorial tactics to put them in the frame with their human cast members (a’la Sean Byrne folding 4K footage of actual sharks into the material of Dangerous Animals).
Beast of War, calling on Jaws’ example, features a mechanical shark, constructed by the Australian animatronic effects outfit Formation Effects: a 20-foot-long behemoth of practical engineering, made for the express purpose of giving Roache-Turner’s actors a physical being to interact with during the film’s many attack scenes. It’s a big shark. It’s a scarred-up shark. It’s a tangible shark, and as such, a fearsome one.
Beast of War mostly follows the basics of the Armidale’s plight, with fresh-faced cadets in basic training in 1942, picking up skills they won’t get a chance to use–like how to set up a spike trap for enemy combatants in the bush, or the proper technique for thrusting a bayonet into a hostile’s chest.
Twenty minutes into the movie, the boys are blown out of (or into, more accurately) by Japanese warplanes, and forced into a life and death contest against a great white that’s all too happy to snap up the easy pickings left thrashing in the sea.
The story centers on Leo (Mark Coles Smith), an Aboriginal recruit who better embodies the Royal Australian Navy’s core values than his racist cohort, Des Kelly (Sam Delich): Leo would sooner die than leave a man behind, even in a training exercise, like in the opening sequence, when he stops partway through a timed run through the jungle to help a fallen comrade, Will (Joel Nankervis), out of a mud pit.
Poetics and moral codes mean nothing to the shark, of course. It’s a primal force. If the mechanical shark is strictly speaking real, Formation team designed it to look ancient and monstrous, as if a demon that’s called these depths home since time immemorial; Roache-Turner takes such clear pride in Formation’s efforts, and is so determined that the shark should feel like a character and not just an effect, that the first time the creature attacks Leo and his mates, the audience sees it all its gnarled, jawsome glory.
The beat starts in silence, with a hapless soldier quipping to the camera as a telltale fin ominously glides unnoticed into the shot. Then the shark strikes, bearing down on the man in a savage display of brute strength. Cue screaming, flailing, and copious arterial spray.
Roache-Turner generously shares more of the shark, and more and more, as Beast of War plunges forward; even with a lean 87 minute running time, the film maximizes the shark’s presence, capturing it in studiously framed medium shots to showcase the great pains put into its creation. The thing has weight. It has dimension, like Roache-Turner and Formation rolled every shark feasting on the Armidale’s crew into one massive, enduring figure.
To an extent that other sharks in other shark movies simply aren’t, Beast of War’s starring menace leaves an indelible mark–not just from its teeth, but from gravity.
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