I rate this movie, it's fantastic! Watch it immediately on the highest quality you can muster. And man, am I glad that Rotten Tomatoes agrees with me, thanks to them for this review:: On July 28th, 1999, in the midst of quite possibly the best movie year ever, a wildly entertaining summer popcorn movie about genetically modified sharks eating scientists was released into theaters. In a perfect world, Deep Blue Sea would have outperformed The Matrix, The Sixth Sense, and Big Daddy at the box office, and received more critical accolades than Election, The Insider, and Toy Story 2. American Beautywould’ve never won best picture, and Samuel L. Jackson would have an Oscar for his work as Russell Franklin, a monologuing “suit” who gets eaten during one of his monologues. Also, it would’ve cleaned up at the Blockbuster Entertainment and MTV Movie Awards. Okay, so maybe we exaggerate a little. But only a little.

In reality, the $60 million-budgeted, R-rated original creature feature starring a “bionic studmuffin” pulled in a respectable $165 million worldwide, won zero Oscars, and earned a Rotten 59% Tomatometer score. Which is a shame, because Deep Blue Sea is a damn fine blockbuster in its own right that features genuine surprises, inventive set-pieces, and sharks that are a combination of the velociraptors from Jurassic Parkand Bradley Cooper from Limitless. Director Renny Harlin and screenwriters Donna and Wayne Powersand Duncan Kennedy brought the goods, and the end result is a crowd-pleasing delight whose fingerprints can be found on any number of similar movies that followed.

To provide you with five reasons why Deep Blue Sea was a perfect summer blockbuster, we put on our shark fin hats, consumed all the smart-shark serum we could find, and dove into a glassy underwater world filled with gliding beasts to convince you of its greatness.