Warning! This article contains spoilers for Meg 2: The Trench. If you've yet to see the movie and don't want to know anything that happens, turn back now!
No one can believe that actually happens in Meg 2: The Trench. No, we're not talking about the bit where Jason Statham holds a humungous shark's jaws open with just his legs, or when Wu Jing uses a bomb made of fertilizer to blow up a giant octopus; we're talking about the bit where protagonist Jonas Taylor swims across the ocean floor with no diving gear...
Directed by Ben Wheatley, the sci-fi sequel sees eco-warrior Jonas and his team stumble across an illegal mining operation while investigating the deepest depths of the Mariana Trench. Their dive is disrupted when head miner Montes – and their shady employer, billionaire Hillary Driscoli – blows up his team to hide their work from the scientist explorers, ripping a hole in the thermocline layer and grounding Jonas (Statham) and his buddies' ships.
Having previously spotted escape pods attached to the miners' secret station, Jonas and co throw on their high-tech exosuits and start trudging along the ocean floor towards it. Not all of them make it, due to limited oxygen supplies and a trio of megalodons and other aquatic creatures wreaking havoc, but the situation gets even more dire when Jess, their navigator on the surface, reveals herself to be in cahoots with Hillary. She releases the escape pods before Jonas, his stepdaughter Meiying, Jiuming, and Rigas get to them, before trapping them inside a flooding chamber. Now, here's where things get a little bonkers...
Realizing that the only way they'll be able to escape the chamber is by someone opening it from the outside, Jonas volunteers to swim out of a hatch and round to the doorway, freeing the others. Meiying immediately protests, claiming that he'll die from the pressure of being 25,000ft below sea level but Rigas reassures the youngster that he'll be fine, so long as he breathes out the air from his lungs and sinuses beforehand and doesn't stay in the water for longer than, say, 60 seconds. "You don't see the megs wearing exosuits, do you?" Rigas argues. Okay...
"Protection from the crushing pressure of millions of tonnes of water isn't important. You know what is important? Family," one viewer joked on a recent Reddit thread, which features plenty of people reveling in the scene while others try to apply logic to it.
"The more I hear about this movie the more I can't wait to watch it. Statham knows how to pick good junk food action movies," wrote another, as a third adds: "He was just built different."
"This movie is like it was made by someone who got their mind blown by the cinematic experience of the [Sharknado] movies and spared no expenses to recreate something bigger," said a fourth.
"This is actually a reference to how Jason Statham trained to become invincible in preparation for his role as 'Jason Statham' in the Fast and Furious franchise," commented one more.
The whole above sequence is made even more bizarre, too, when you consider that 10 minutes or so before it, one of the Mana One team members is killed when her exosuit helmet cracks and, ultimately, implodes. A few Reddit users even questioned both moments' plausibility in comparison to the tragic OceanGate incident, which saw a Titan submersible containing five men collapse in on itself during an expedition to the Titanic wreckage, in June 2023.
"Yeah, well, that's because the Titan sub was a submersible and he's a person.... completely different things," something claimed, while another argued: "That's why the call it a work of fiction."
Meg 2: The Trench is in cinemas now. For more, check out our list of the most exciting upcoming movies heading our way throughout 2023 and beyond.
