This week, Cape Town Shark Researcher Alison Kock, gave her opinion on the recent shark movie ‘Dark Tide‘:
She told the Daily Mail: “After reading the script we decided it was not something we would like to put our names to.
“Our mandate is to try to change people’s perceptions of sharks. The first script that we got sounded very much like it had a thriller aspect to it and a personal kind of aspect to it as well.
“But fighting off a shark, or surviving a shark attack – we couldn’t see the positive side of that, as much as we tried.”
Hollywood is counting on scenes of Halle Barry in a bikini to draw in male audiences, but the movie appears to be furthering negative stereotypes of sharks as menacing predators, waiting to attack humans, a la ‘Jaws’ [1975], something we need to get beyond if sharks are to be protected.