Retrospectively, Deep Blue Sea has been regarded as a successful shark film, especially within a limited genre that has been dominated by Steven Spielberg's 1975 thriller Jaws.

In a remote underwater facility, doctors Susan McCallister and Jim Whitlock are conducting research on mako sharks to help in the re-activation of dormant human brain cells like those found in Alzheimer's disease patients.

The largest shark grabs the stretcher and pulls the helicopter into the tower, killing Brenda and the pilots, as well as causing massive explosions that severely damage the facility.

In the facility's kitchen, which has been partially flooded, cook Sherman "Preacher" Dudley, whose parrot is eaten by a shark, manages to kill the big fish by setting off an explosion with his lighter.

Carter and Scoggins go to the flooded laboratory to activate a control panel that drains a stairway to the surface, while Susan heads to her room to collect her research material.

Carter orders Preacher to connect the trailing wire to a battery, sending an electric current to an explosive charge in the harpoon, killing the shark.

The story of Deep Blue Sea was conceived by Australian screenwriter Duncan Kennedy after he witnessed the result of a "horrific" shark attack on a beach near his home.

[4] This motivated him to write a spec script, while acknowledging the challenge of approaching a shark film without repeating Steven Spielberg's 1975 thriller Jaws.

He revealed that as production approached, he "helped to brainstorm ideas for sequences that weren't working" and that DBS producer and acclaimed writer Akiva Goldsman did the final rewrites on the film.

[9] To achieve this, he combined relatively unknown actors who could deliver solid performances and meet the physical demands of the diving and stunts with a star, Academy Award nominee Samuel L. Jackson, who "anchors the whole piece".

[16] To distinguish Deep Blue Sea from Jaws, where the shark is frequently hidden, Harlin decided to show theirs more prominently because he felt that audience expectations had changed since then.

[14] As Jackson explained, "At one point three tons of water got thrown on us by accident and we got swept toward those cargo bays and everyone thought we were going into the drink and people were tumbling around this metal grating [...] We scrambled up and kept acting [...] That was not supposed to happen and we didn't have safety harnesses on and we were flailing around on this deck.

The first album, Deep Blue Sea: Music from the Motion Picture, was released on August 3, 1999 by Warner Bros. Records and features a set of hip hop and R&B tracks by several artists, including Hi-C, Cormega, and Bass Odyssey.

[22] The second album, Deep Blue Sea: Original Motion Picture Score, was released on August 24, 1999 by Varèse Sarabande and contains musical tracks by Rabin.

[24] During its second weekend, the film grossed an estimated $11 million and finished in fifth place, behind The Sixth Sense, The Blair Witch Project, Runaway Bride, and The Thomas Crown Affair.

[3] The film's performance was compared to Stephen Sommers's The Mummy and Jan de Bont's The Haunting, which had a similar budget and made a significant impact on the box office in the summer of 1999.

[29] Writing for Chicago Sun-Times, Roger Ebert gave the film three out of four stars and praised it as "a skillful thriller", saying that Deep Blue Sea "is essentially one well-done action sequence after another [...] It doesn't linger on the special effects (some of the sharks look like cartoons), but it knows how to use timing, suspense, quick movement and [especially] surprise".

[30] In a positive review, Kenneth Turan of Los Angeles Times considered Deep Blue Sea a return to form for Harlin, especially after the "dismal swamps" of Cutthroat Island and The Long Kiss Goodnight.

[31] He described the film as "an example of how expert action filmmaking and up-to-the-minute visual effects can transcend a workmanlike script and bring excitement to conventional genre material".

[32] In a three-and-a-half out of four review, Robert Lasowski of The Florida Times-Union highly praised the film's pacing, intense action, and chase scenes, stating that Deep Blue Sea is "a great popcorn movie" and "what summer at the cineplex is all about".

[34][35][36][37] Writing for The New York Times, Stephen Holden described Deep Blue Sea as "a cut-rate Titanic stripped of romance and historical resonance and fused with Jaws, shorn of mythic symbolism and without complex characters",[35] while Barbara Shulgasser of Chicago Tribune criticized it for being an inferior imitation of Jurassic Park, but praised LL Cool J's performance and the film's realistic setting.

[36] Ian Nathan of the British magazine Empire gave the film three out of five stars and criticized its B movie conventions, stating that "You're never entirely sure whether you're laughing at or with Deep Blue Sea.

[41] In a 2016 retrospective, Wired editor Brian Raftery considered Deep Blue Sea "the greatest non-Jaws shark movie of all time" and superior to Jaume Collet-Serra's The Shallows.

[42] He remarked that, within a genre that had been dominated by Jaws, Deep Blue Sea features "genuinely inventive" action sequences, "nicely rounded-out, human" characters, and memorable death scenes.

[42] Raftery also noted that the film was among the last of its kind, describing it as "[a]n R-rated B-movie, full of gore and chaos and smart-stupidness, but with a big-budget, big-cast sheen", in a similar way to Paul Verhoeven's Total Recall and Starship Troopers, Roland Emmerich's Stargate, and Luc Besson's The Fifth Element.

"[45] In 2015, Den of Geek!, a publication of Dennis Publishing, ranked Deep Blue Sea only behind Jaws and credited it for its action-packed scenes and intelligent sharks.

[48] In 2019, to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the release of Deep Blue Sea, the Screamfest Horror Film Festival hosted a screening at the TCL Chinese theaters in Hollywood, California, as part of its "Fears & Beers" program.