Participation Required: ‘The Meg’ Is Enjoyable If You Know How to Enjoy

Rules of the Theater: Don’t talk much. If you must talk to the person next to you, keep your voice down. Don’t use your phone much. If you must use your phone, dim the brightness as low as you can. Don’t talk spoilers. If you know what’s going to happen, keep it to yourself or ask the person you’re speaking with whether they’re sensitive to spoilers or prefer to go in cold. These are the rules we live by to keep the shared experience of movie-going pleasant, and to respect the film and everyone’s enjoyment of it. Except for films like The Meg. Shark movies have long become their own sub-genre, complete with predictable plots of survival as a human-hungry shark defies most of what you learned in July during Shark Week. A shark is an easy villain –- non-verbal, blood-thirsty, terrifying -– that lends itself well to a simple formula.

Let’s not bury the lead: The Meg doesn’t change the formula. It doesn’t add to it or attempt a twist on its tropes. The story is one that you know so well you couldn’t spoil it if you tried: a super shark is on an insatiable mission to kill and can only be stopped when the right man has had enough, turns to face it, and stabs it in the eye. Slasher films and enclosed survival movies should rarely be judged on their originality or thoughtfulness (those are pleasant surprises for the few that exemplify those characteristics) but rather how fun you can have with them till they reach their end. The Meg is appropriately a participator sport, the kind wh…