Barry Levinson has written and/or directed a number of films set in his native Baltimore (Diner, Tin Men and Avalon among them), and he's returned to the Maryland coast to make this superior example of that hackneyed sub-genre, the found-footage horror movie. The title refers to Chesapeake Bay, site of an ecological disaster that destroys most of the several hundred inhabitants of a small holiday resort on 4 July 2009, for which irresponsible farmers and a complacent, politically motivated mayor are to blame. All that remains is a federally suppressed documentary, recording the terrible events that began some weeks before and were attributed to a shark.
The tension is well enough sustained, the horrors build steadily, the eco message is familiar. The film is a variant on Jaws, an influence it signals by calling the despicable mayor Stockman, the name of both the complacent mayor and his brother, the honourable ecological whistle-blower, in Ibsen's An Enemy of the People, the play that inspired Peter Benchley's Jaws.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2013/mar/03/the-bay-levinson-review
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