Beast Of War

Eat your heart of darkness out with the bloody great WWII shark movie Beast Of War, written and directed by Kiah Roache-Turner. It opens with Australian soldiers being trained to fight the Japanese by a tough-talking sergeant (Steve Le Marquand) who lost an arm in combat. The sergeant lets the men know that your mate is sometimes the only thing you can count on. However, one soldier, Stan (Maximillian Johnson), doesn’t look out for his mates much, especially Leo (Mark Cole Smith), who Stan feels has the wrong skin tone. Leo has a different attitude, as he will bend over backwards for his mates, even getting Will (Joel Nankervis) out of a scrape.

It may have something to do with Leo not being able to save his younger brother, Archie (Aswan Reid), while teaching him deep-sea diving, from being eaten by a huge shark. So when their boat gets blown up in the middle of the Timor Sea by an air attack, Leo gets himself and Will on a floating plank from the wreckage pronto. They search for other survivors, pulling aboard their raft Thompson (Sam Parsonson), who has a severe wound and doesn’t understand that the boat has sunk. Then they take on more soldiers who survived, including their old pal Stan.

“…the soldiers on the raft sit lost in a fog, far away from land, the shark starts circling around…”

Meanwhile, a lone soldier (Matthew Scully) sits on a float by himself, shooting his gun in the air at the enemy planes. So he doesn’t see the 20-foot-long great white shark that was attracted by the noise in time and gets eaten. Leo and Will are making noise, too, and Thompson is bleeding into the water. So as the soldiers on the raft sit lost in a fog, far away from land, the shark starts circling around, waiting to devour all that moves.

Beast of War is a bloody great movie despite itself. What I mean is this film will be enjoyed by anyone who sees it, even if you are not a fan of the two film genres Roache-Turner melds together here. As I have said before, I despise war movies, as war sucks, and I don’t like revisiting it. Also, despite listening to a Sharkk Heartt record while writing this, I don’t like shark movies much. Jaws was so over-hyped to me growing up that it bored me when I finally saw it.