I'm not going to lie, our chances aren't great
dir: Kiah Roache-Turner
2025
It’s literally the 50th anniversary of when Jaws came out. As such, every film released in the second half of 2025 has to be a shark film where sharks eat people.
Australia is not exempt from this, in fact, for whatever reason now shark movies have taken over from coal as one of our main exports.
When I saw the introduction to this film where it said “Based on a True Story”, I blurted out, out loud, involuntarily, “Bullshit!”, quicker and louder than Natasha Lyonne does on that show Poker Face where she sorts out the liars from the lied to, the murderers from the murder-curious. Because there is no way any part of this movie conforms to anything that ever happened to anyone, except in that there was a World War II, there were Australian soldiers, and that sharks exist and occasionally eat people.
Beyond that, this film is purest fantasy. Yeah, the HMS Armadale sank in 1942, but that's got nothing to do with this, .
The starting sequence will be familiar to anyone who has ever watched a) any war movies or b) anyone who has watched a movie. Boot camp. Young soldiers being yelled at. Recruits who are wonderful, wholesome and handsome (like our hero Leo played by Mark Coles Smith), or awful, ugly, mean, racist, selfish jerks (like the necessary villain beyond the shark played by Sam Delich, who has an unfortunate resemblance to that FriendlyJordies chap). There are no in-betweens, there are no grey areas on the battlefield or in personalities.
When the recruits are yelled at to do a twenty k run through jungle and mud, they are explicitly told that all of them have to make it back, that they are to support everyone else they all fail. None of them listen except for Leo, who happens to save poor Will (Joel Nankervis) who was going to drown in the mud.
When the two straggle back to the mockery of the other recruits, especially racist Des, their yelling superior tells the others they have to run it again, because those two know the real meaning of mateship, of putting your life on the line for the man next to you, unless he’s a total racist tool, in which case fuck ‘em.
What relevance does this have to the rest of the film, you might wonder? Well, it comes down to values, doesn’t it? The values of self-sacrifice and brotherhood, central as they are considered to be in times of warfare to surviving or “winning” in a moral sense.
I mean, these young men are meant to be going into the worst experience possible, being war. Surely this crucible of suffering will test their resolve, force them to question their characters?
Or maybe people live and die in war and it has nothing to do with morality or mates looking after mates?
The joke is of course on them: these poor fuckers don’t even get to go play soldiers on the battlefield for real: their ship is sunk in the middle of the Timor Sea, and a handful of the characters we were introduced to at the beginning huddle together on a piece of the ship that somehow still floats, as one shark tries to eat them all.
And what a work of nature this beast of war must be. Infinite of appetite, formidable in aspect, ruthless in its ironic timing; is this shark a shark or a metaphor?
I mean, to most people who watched Jaws over the last fifty years, that big bloody shark was just a big, bloody shark. It didn’t symbolise the ruthlessness of Nature red in tooth and claw; it didn’t symbolise humanity’s arrogance in the face of an environment it cannot dominate (but it can make worse). It was just a shark that ate lots of people: women, children, crusty old captains, anyone. None of the millions of people who saw it started thinking afterwards that the shark represented the insignificance of human civilisation and the puniness of human efforts in the face of a giant set of teeth.
Of course anyone who read the book by Peter Benchley that the flick was based on knew that the shark symbolised the local sheriff’s fear of sexual inadequacy in the face of being cuckolded by the marine biologist, who gets his, make no mistake. I mean, that’s just so obvious.
Here, well, sometimes to paraphrase Freud a shark is just a penis. I mean, sorry, sometimes a shark is just a creature that chomps on lots of people.
It has the thin veneer of a morality play, like, good people are rewarded (most still die), bad people are chomped worst of all, but really we know who the only ones are that are going to survive, so we spend most of our time agonising over who’s going to get the chop next.
One of their number has a head injury, and keeps wondering why they don’t just get onboard their ship and sail away? and though he’s an unwitting threat to their survival, he’s not deliberately a prick. I think his name was Thommo, but, I’ll be very honest, they’re all young and have the same haircuts, so it was very difficult for me to differentiate between many of the white cast as they end up on the conveyor belt into the beast’s belly.
Chomp chomp chomp: the movie’s makers probably didn’t have a massive budget, which is why we really don’t see more than the shark’s head or fin for most of the flick’s duration. In Jaws famously the mechanical contraption they’d contrapted together (affectionately nicknamed Bruce) kept breaking down, which meant they showed the shark very infrequently, very sparingly. Here it’s because, well, let’s be honest, finding creative solutions to budgetary constraints is a fancy way of saying “it looks like shit in parts because we didn’t have the budget for anything more”.
I have no doubt that large sections of this flick were filmed in a pool somewhere. That’s fine. It’s probably safer for the performers and the crew to have it all happen in a safe environment and not risk killing or injuring people. No flick has ever been worth sacrificing human lives, except for maybe one or two Tilda Swinton movies where she demanded human sacrifices and the producers went along with it to keep her happy.
But other flicks go to a little bit more effort to hide the humbleness of the production, or find ways of tricking the eye of the viewer as to the scale of what we’re watching. This flick really can’t, which is probably a good thing because hey, after all, there was a lot of public money (as in, taxpayer funded productions through Screen NSW and Screen QLD) involved.
It’s a technically competent production, don’t get me wrong – it doesn’t feel like it was made for television. It’s just that, damn, people watching this, like some guy in his 60s scrolling through the various streamers who clicks on this will get whiplash at how it goes from wholesome wartime movie where handsome jerks flirt with nurses to soldiers getting eaten by a shark, or making the mistake of granting mercy to a Japanese pilot. And whiplash at that age can be serious, serious damage involved, loads of time to recover.
I shouldn’t focus on limitations, I should focus on what the flick gets right. Even if most of these poor bastards are destined for shark food, and even if they only seem to speak in clichés, some of which couldn’t have been used decades before they were invented (just like the CPR we see someone give a fellow soldier, which, you know…), Mark Coles Smith does a superb job as the default leader of this ragtag motley crew of dickheads and desperadoes who does everything, everything in his power in order to save people from the shark and sometimes from themselves.
We even get to see a beautiful illustration of the paradox of tolerance at play when he does his darndest to save someone who considers him to be sub-human, someone who hates him deeply because he sees in Leo someone who possesses all the qualities that he never will, and yet even that isn’t enough to safeguard our hero. And yes, even in something fairly forgettable, it hurts to hear a character spouting racist invective, whether it’s a member of Parliament or a member of Leo’s crew, but it’s a necessary reminder of how this colonialist country hates the indigenous by default.
It made me think in an earlier era if this flick had been made there would have been more scenes of racist abuse, from the hierarchy to the other new starters, but when the racist does his racisting here, the other soldiers just look away, or look slightly embarrassed for him. I’m not saying it’s a nuanced portrait of the racism indigenous diggers faced, or even a particularly illuminating one, but it’s at least a significant part of the narrative.
It’s an enjoyable but limited flick, so I can’t heartily recommend it, but neither should it be condemned outright. I applaud them for giving it a red hot go. I absolutely hated the way they punked out on the ending in order to imply a sequel could happen, but by that time I was glad it was over (87 minutes is the perfect length for this movie).
6 times Mark Coles Smith should be this nation’s next Hemsworth-level celebrity / actor, and I don’t mean Liam, Luke, Callum or Doug, I mean Chris out of 10
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“On the battlefield, there’s only you and your mates” – mates don’t let mates get eaten by sharks - Beast of War
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