Emma MacNeil

Emma MacNeil is an oceanographer and the protagonist of the 2009 Asylum film Mega Shark Versus Giant Octopus. She later returned in the third Mega Shark film, Mega Shark Versus Mecha Shark. She is portrayed in both films by pop singer Deborah Gibson.

Mega Shark Versus Giant Octopus (2009)
Emma was an oceanographer for the NorCal Oceanographic Institute who stole the Aquanaut 3 submarine to examine a migrating pod of whales off the coast of Alaska. However, the whales began to slam into a wall of ice, which Emma noticed was because of an illegal Sonar device that had been dropped in the water. She and her navigator narrowly escaped the rough waters, and Emma thought she saw some other creatures escaping from the ice. On arriving at work on Point Dume, they were sent to examine a beached whale carcass that he employer had said was killed by tanker propellers, but Emma saw that pattern of wounds indicated an attack by an organic creature. She was promptly dismissed to await her assessment by the review board over her stealing the submarine. However, having noticed an odd fragment in the carcass, she sneaked back onto the site to remove it. After being formally fired and cleaning the fragment, Emma sought the help of her former professor Lamar Sanders, who took her to his house to analyze the sample. There, Lamar determined it was the tooth of a Megalodon. Emma was skeptical, but Lamar stood by his decision, citing recent unexplained nautical disasters, and centuries of sea-monster sightings including one of his own, and the fact that Megalodons fed on large sea creatures like whales. He then received a call from Dr. Seiji Shimada whom they met at the San Francisco Airport. Shimada sought their help in identifying the creature attacking Japan, and just after they realized there had to have been more than one creature, Emma relieved a package with footage from her minisub voyage showing A Megalodon and Giant Octopus emerging from the ice. The next morning, Lamar's home was invaded by the military, and the three were taken to the Treasure Island U.S. Naval command station, where they informed the military that there were two monsters, an octopus in addition to the shark. Seiji and Emma then made it clear that the beasts were to be captured and not killed. Lamar and Seiji had already determined that their ideal capture points were the shelves of Tokyo Bay and San Francisco Bay. After nights of fruitless work on trying to design a lure for the monsters, Seiji and Emma began to talk about their love of the ocean and their deep seated connections to it. This lead to them kissing and having sex, which gave them the breakthrough of using pheromones to attract the monsters to the bays. After the military sent a fighter jet to get pictures of the Octopus, it was swatted out of the sky despite Lamar's demands to get the plane out of its reach.

With the shark fast approaching, Emma and Lamar entered the Aquanaut 3 to manually position the final canister of pheromones. However, the manipulator arm froze, and Emma was forced to maneuver the ship to ram the canister out of the arm. The arm broke off, and the two quickly retreated. On learning that the Japanese were also unsuccessful, the military proposed using nuclear weapons, which would be devastating to the ecosystem. Amid nightmares of global destruction, Emma decided that the only way to win was to get the monsters to kill each other. They reused the pheromone tactic, as it had worked perfectly before. She knew that they would fight one another, as they had ignored their survival instincts in the ice age to fight one another. After receiving a distress call from a Russian tanker, they were attacked by Mega Shark. With no other hope of escape, Lamar guided them through an ice trench in which after a mutinous navigator refused to continue, Emma knocked him out and Lamar assumed control. However, just as they escaped the trench, and the Shark was about to attack, the Octopus grabbed its tail, and they began to fight. They surfaced the submarine to escape, and emerged where she had taken the Aquanaut to watch the whales. The shark then attacked, and Emma, Lamar and a military commander abandon ship in the Aquanaut just before the Shark tore the main submarine in two. Shortly before being attacked, the Japanese Lead Sub Typhoon arrived to fire on the shark before being attacked by the octopus. The beasts began to fight and Emma went down to search for Seiji and the Typhoon, which found them shortly as the two beasts sank.

Back on the shore, Emma and Seiji sat on the beach to reflect on their day and their adventures, when Lamar approached with infrared images of an unidentified creature in the North Sea, and they all left to investigate it.

Mega Shark Versus Mecha Shark (2014)
To be added.