Deep Blue Sea 4K UHD Review

Arrow Video

Blu-ray Release: March 18, 2025

Video: 2.40:1/2160p (HDR10/Dolby Vision)/Color

Audio: English Dolby Atmos and DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1

Subtitles: English SDH

Run Time: 105:03

Director: Renny Harlin

At an isolated research facility in the middle of the ocean, a team of scientists, led by Susan McAlester (Saffron Burrows), are working on a cure for Alzheimer's by genetically altering the brains of sharks. When a shark escapes and attacks a pleasure boat, the company sponsoring the research threatens to pull its funding and sends corporate executive Russell Franklin (Samuel L. Jackson) to investigate. McAlester has just 48 hours to prove the value of her work, but her experiments have made the sharks smarter. As a freak storm causes chaos on the surface, making it impossible to leave, the facility is flooded and the scientists must fight to survive against the rising water and the hungry sharks that now swim freely through the corridors. (From Arrow’s official synopsis)

There’s a good argument for deeming Finnish filmmaker Renny Harlin as the case study of a Hollywood director during the 1990s. His films weren’t always the best of their kind, but his career arc epitomizes the broader arc of popular movies and filmmakers across genres during the decade. After making his American debut under B-movie mavens Charles Band and Irwin Yablans (Prison, 1988), he had his late ’80s breakthrough with a reliable franchise sequel, A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master (1988). It was the series’ biggest hit at the time and put him on the radars of every studio looking to make a sequel to their reliable franchises, including Alien 3 (he left during pre-production, 1992) and Die Hard 2 (1990). His success led him to make movies with two of the three superstar mascots of Planet Hollywood (Sylvester Stallone and Bruce Willis, though one assumes he was in talks to team up with Schwarzenegger at some point) and became romantically linked to two more of the era’s biggest celebrities, Laura Dern and Geena Davis.

Alas, like the aging superstars and megastudios he was so often associated with, Harlin’s career wasn’t made to survive the next millennium. He and then-wife Geena Davis’ first collaboration, Cutthroat Island (1995), was one of the largest box office flops of all time. The release was so disastrous that an already ailing Carolco Pictures was forced to shutter its doors. Fortunately, the effect on his career was delayed and he closed out the decade with, arguably, his two best movies, The Long Kiss Goodnight (1996) and Deep Blue Sea (1999).

Deep Blue Sea combines the excessive early ‘90s action aesthetic with high concept themes straight out of ‘70s studio sci-fi, like Richard Fleischer’s Soylent Green (1973) and Michael Crichton’s Westworld (1973), all while paying homage to the original so-called blockbuster and greatest eco-horror adventure of all time, Steven Spielberg’s Jaws (1975). It asks the always pertinent question: what if sharks, nature’s ultimate killing machines, were, like, really smart? If that sounds silly, that’s just fine, because, in spite of being made in the irony-soaked ‘90s, Deep Blue Sea is about one-third comedy and has a very good measure of when to be funny, when to be exciting, and when to be scary. Samuel L. Jackson’s all-timer, shock-and-awe death scene is a great example of this balance and I can attest to its impact in a packed theater. 

Deep Blue Sea’s fundamental value – besides being well made, well cast, and not afraid to sincerely embrace its sillier aspects – is in its clever mash-up approach to genre. It’s mostly sold as a horror movie with an action slant, which it is, complete with pithy one-liners, massive explosions, and slo-mo money shots. But, like Jurassic Park (1993), the film it most resembles, it’s also a mad scientist story and, more importantly, it’s built like a disaster movie, from the massive storm that sets off events to its pattern of constantly throwing its ensemble cast from the frying pan and into the fire (in LL Cool J’s case, from the shark-infested kitchen and into the oven). It’s The Towering Inferno (1974) with rushing seawater in place of roaring flames. There were a lot of big money disaster movies released in the ‘90s, but, for my money, the only one better than Deep Blue Sea is Roger Donaldson’s similarly structured Dante’s Peak (1997)

Deep Blue Sea was Harlin’s last notable hit. He spent the next two decades churning out awful-to-okay action and horror movies, including a minor sleeper cult favorite in the (unintentionally?) homoerotic witch-boy thriller The Covenant (2006), starring largely unknown young actors Sebastian Stan and Taylor Kitsch. Funnily enough, he has since returned to making sequels to reliable horror franchises with The Strangers: Chapter 1 (2024), which is scheduled to be the first in a three film revamp of Bryan Bertino’s The Strangers (2008).

Video

You’d assume that a film shot on 35mm and made in the early days of digital grading would look just fine on Blu-ray, but Warner Bros.’ original disc was soft and mushy, so there was a lot of room for improvement here. I’ve included screencaps from the Blu-ray copy for illustrative purposes, but if you want a better look at the differences, some kind soul has uploaded a comparison on Caps-a-Holic. Arrow’s transfer is derived from a new 4K restoration that was approved by Harlin himself.

The occasionally iffy digital effects appear extra iffy. due to the increased resolution and better grain representation, but viewers are just going to have to deal with it, because I can assure you that it looked just as weird in theaters. The original oh-so-’90s blue tint has been preserved and color timing between the old Blu-ray and new UHD is almost identical. The 4K disc offers more color and better blends – the green highlights and orange/yellow quality of the perpetual sunset daylight shots are particularly great – but doesn’t radically change anything. My one issue with the remaster is that the Dolby Vision dynamic range upgrade pushes white highlights a smidge too bright during dark shots, leading to a pseudo-black light effect. Honestly, it's such an overtly slick-looking movie that I assume this was also done on purpose.

Audio

Deepest, bluest, my hat is like a shark’s fin.

Deep Blue Sea comes fitted with original, uncompressed English DTS-HD 5.1 and Dolby Atmos remix audio options. Both are good representations of the original tracks and their aggressive directional glory, but I found the Atmos mix a bit floaty, especially in terms of basic dialogue, so I mostly stuck to the 5.1 track. Composer Trevor Rabin’s score is very of its era and deserves credit for not mimicking John Williams’ Jaws theme. My partner watches a lot of Formula 1 racing and I’ve long been struck by how similar his hero theme is to the official F1 theme – a comparison made more intriguing by the fact that Harlin’s Deep Blue Sea follow-up, Driven (2001), was about Formula 1. I looked into it and the F1 theme was done by Brian Tyler, who was scoring a different fast car movie, The Fast and the Furious, in 2001.

Extras

• Commentary with Duncan Kennedy – The first exclusive Arrow commentary features the screenwriter (he was responsible for the original spec script and rewrites), who chats about his many drafts of the script, the long production process, his continued involvement, working with the producers, co-writers, and filmmakers, and changes made to the story over time (in his commentary, Harlin also goes into the reshoots done to appease test audiences).

• Commentary with Rebekah McKendry – The director of Bring It On: Cheer or Die (2022) and co-director of Christmas anthology horror All the Creatures were Stirring (2018, with David Ian McKendry) explores the making of the film, the plot and characters, and Deep Blue Sea’s place in the killer shark pantheon, 

• Commentary with director Renny Harlin and actor Samuel L. Jackson – This is the original 1999 DVD commentary where Jackson famously leaves after his character dies. He and Harlin were recorded separately and edited together.

• From the Frying Pan... into the Studio Tank (25:08, HD) – Production designer/art director William Sandell discusses his training with Roger Corman’s company and making Mean Streets (1973), RoboCop (1987), Total Recall (1990), and, of course, Deep Blue Sea, including photos from his private collection.

• Beneath the Surface (19:30, HD) – Horror Queers podcast co-host Trace Thurman closes out the new extras with a look at Saffron Burrows’ character, Susan McAlester, and the history of strong and/or monstrous women in horror movies, including extensive descriptions of Freud’s theory of the Phallic Woman. He concludes (rightly) that the killing of her character (a part of those reshoots I keep mentioning) was an act of misogyny.

• Archival features:

  • When Sharks Attack: The Making of Deep Blue Sea (15:07, SD)

  • The Sharks of the Deep Blue Sea (8:19, SD)

  • Deleted scenes with optional commentary from director Renny Harlin (8:02)

• Theatrical trailer 

• Image galleries – Posters & stills, production art and design

The images on this page are taken from the included Blu-ray copy – NOT the 4K UHD – and sized for the page. Larger versions can be viewed by clicking the images. Note that there will be some JPG compression.