FILM PREVIEW
"Great White Shark" shows daily through Sept. 26 (subject to change). Extended showtimes available Fridays during Martinis & Imax. Tickets: $13 for adults, $12 for students and seniors, $11 for children 12 and younger, and $8 for Fernbank Museum of Natural History members. Add a museum ticket as part of a value pass for extra savings. Fernbank Museum of Natural History, 767 Clifton Road N.E., Atlanta. 404-929-6400, www.fernbankmuseum.org.
Behold Carcharodon carcharias. He's the big swimmer, the bigger scare. He's that dorsal in the shallows, the shadow in the distance. In his environment, the great white shark has nothing to fear.
But oh, we do. The clever folks at the Fernbank Museum of Natural History know that.
The museum is showcasing Mr. Carcharodon in “Great White Shark,” a 2013 film that details the lives of these toothy predators. Fernbank is showing the film on its Imax screen. That’s about as realistic an encounter as you’ll have without wetting your pants.
(Hey, sharks live in water, so of course you’d get your drawers wet. Right?)
The film dovetails nicely with Shark Week, the Discovery Channel's yearly homage to one of the oldest species on Earth. Shark Week bows at 8 p.m. Sunday. Some titles in this series, airing for the 27th year: "Lair of the Mega Shark," "Zombie Shark" and "Monster Hammerhead."
And, at Fernbank, an intimate look at that scariest shark of all. The film starts off the way you’d expect, with sharks swimming. They glide as if pulled by invisible strings. They look like knives slicing blue fabric.
Cut to the surface. You see scientists on Lucie, a jaunty little white boat, catching a few newborns — they’re called pups — off the California coast. They do scientific things — measuring the creatures, looking at their many teeth, attaching tracking devices, and so on. It’s worth noting that one guy is wearing a Chicago Cubs T-shirt, an affront to most living creatures.
The film manages to slide in educational tidbits. Did you know that a great white shark becomes docile when turned on its back? That’s easy to do when wrestling a 4-footer into position. But what about when that fish reaches 20 feet and weighs 2 tons?
Let's let Chief Brody handle that one. The fictitious character, portrayed by actor Roy Scheider, shared billing with a mechanical horror in that all-time scariest fish movie, "Jaws." In that 1975 film, he, Quint (Robert Shaw) and Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss) are searching for a man-eating great white. It finds them.
The shark passes the stern of their boat, its mouth a manhole lined with white spikes. Brody sees it first. He nearly swallows his cigarette. He walks backward to the cabin, finds Quint, and offers some advice:
“You’re gonna need a bigger boat.”
Sal Jorgensen, a shark expert and research scientist at the Monterey Bay Aquarium in California, knows that line well. He considers the book and movie "a literary and cinematic masterpiece."
“I think everybody has a degree of fascination with sharks,” Jorgensen said. “The danger of them captures the imagination.”
Numbers prove it. Nearly 3 million people have visited the aquarium since it began displaying infant great whites nine years ago, showing each temporarily before releasing it.
The aquarium also assisted in producing “Great White Shark,” which showcases the range of these swimmers. They are found as far away as South Africa, as close as the shallows of some California beaches. And, wherever sharks gather, humans are sure to follow.
Gansbaai, South Africa, for example, bills itself as the "Great White Shark Capital of the World." Boats from this seaport town put out every day filled with people who have paid for the privilege of getting in the water with great whites. Tour guides lure sharks with dead fish, meat and other delectables to their boats. They tear at the bait, immense and gray and powerful and, yes, scary as hell.
The clients, meantime, are watching the carnage from the relative safety of cages lowered into the water.
Yes, “relative.” Remember what happened to that cage in “Jaws”?
The film lasts 40 minutes. It passes quickly. Filmgoers learn that great white populations are beginning to rebound, though they still face a threat from the demand for shark fin soup. And scientists are still trying to discern what effect pollution has on these fish, which have prowled the seas for a half-billion years.
But the director also knows why people paid to see his film. As the credits roll, folks should linger until the last shot. It is a fast scene. It begins with something — Some meat? A dead fish? — floating on the sea’s surface. There’s the slightest swirl behind it.
And then —
Maybe you can get wet pants in an Imax theater. Find out for yourself.
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