The Meg Blu-ray + DVD Combo Pack Review
By Paul Rudoff on Nov. 13, 2018 at 12:00 PM in Home Video, Horror

First there was Jaws. Then there was Deep Blue Sea. Now The Meg gives you a new reason to stay out of the water. Is The Meg a good movie? Read on to find out...

The Meg is not a movie about the daughter on Family Guy. This "Meg" is a Megalodon, the massive formerly extinct shark that makes the Great White look like a little guppy. It attacks a deep-sea submersible - part of an international undersea observation program - causing it to lie disabled at the bottom of the deepest part of the Pacific Ocean with its crew trapped inside. With time running out, former deep-sea rescue diver Jonas Taylor (Jason Statham) is drawn out of self-imposed exile by Chinese oceanographer Dr. Zhang (Winston Chao), against the wishes of his daughter, Suyin (Li Bingbing), who thinks she can rescue the crew on her own. It takes their combined efforts to save the crew, and the ocean itself, from the seemingly unstoppable prehistoric 75-foot-long Megalodon.

Joining Jonas and Suyin are Mac (Cliff Curtis), Jaxx (Ruby Rose), DJ (Page Kennedy), The Wall (Olafur Darri Olafsson), Suyin's daughter Meiying (Sophia Cai), and the guy who's paying for it all, Morris (Rainn Wilson). Care to guess which one doesn't make it to the end of the movie? Yeah, the movie definitely plays by the tropes, but that doesn't make it a bad film. The trope of the "cute kid" who really has no business being there gets played, but in this case, I actually enjoyed it. Sophia Cai is so adorable, and her character adds so much of the levity, that I found myself liking the scenes she was in. I do wish that Ruby Rose as Jaxx were given more to do, as her talents were wasted, for the most part.

The Meg is an absolutely fun "monster movie", but it doesn't hold any surprises. You'll know what to expect from the premise, more so if you've seen any of the Jaws films. The "shark" is shown a lot more than in Jaws, something even director Jon Turteltaub points out in one of the featurettes. That's not a problem here because it's not a clunky mechanical creature. It's a CGI monstrosity, and I mean that in the best possible way. Kudos to the effects team for making the Megalodon look downright scary.

At a runtime of 1:53:13, The Meg is presented in its original 2.40:1 aspect ratio with an 1080p transfer. On the audio side, there's an English Dolby Atmos-TrueHD track, 5.1 DTS-HD Master Audio tracks for English and English Descriptive, and 5.1 Dolby Digital audio tracks for French, Spanish, and Portuguese. The film includes English SDH, French, Spanish, and Portuguese subtitles. (The Portuguese audio and subtitles are not mentioned on the case.) The first print run includes a beautiful slipsleeve.

All of the bonus features that can be found on the disc are in HD.
- Chomp On This: The Making Of The Meg (12:09) - Director Jon Turteltaub and the cast reveal the challenges and fun of working in open water.
- Creating The Beast (10:25) - A look at the thought and design process behind creating the beastly Megalodon.
- New Zealand Film Commission (1:53) - A short bit of promotion for New Zealand and how great it is to film there. (Methinks this is only here because Warner Bros. was contractually-obligated as part of the tax credits they received.)

A Movies Anywhere/Ultraviolet digital copy code voucher is also included in the standard two-disc Blu-ray case.

The Meg is available on Blu-ray/DVD Combo Pack, 4K UHD Combo Pack, 3D Blu-ray, and individual DVD.
All images were taken from the IMDB gallery of the film. The Blu-ray+DVD Combo Pack has been provided by Warner Brothers for review on this site.
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