Despite a generally offbeat tone and a fun sensibility, The Meg definitely still takes its particular brand of carnage and horror seriously.
The film plays its shark-based scares with a straight face, and the moments in which the enormous shark attack humans on a remote Chinese beach are played for the horror that they embody.
That was what Jon Turteltaub was going for as he shot these sequences on the beach and, as he explained in his recent interview with Syfy Wire, the extras who acted in these scenes seemed to get caught up in the fun of the whole ordeal, thus creating character breaks that he had to edit around.