A decade ago, a documentary like Oceans would have left everybody agape. And it is still the sort of thing that keeps Discovery Channel junkies jones-ing for more.
But the bar for Disney’s Disneynature studio was set high last year with Earth, the mind-blowing experience culled from the BBC’s Planet Earth series.
Oceans is not from that nature-film gene pool, nor is it close to that standard. Its French filmmakers — previously best known for the 2001 film Winged Migration — are less able storytellers, but nonetheless passionate about the beautiful tableau their marine location shoots provide. Clearly of the show-it, don’t-explain-it school of documentary filmmaking, the exposition is sparse, with narrator Pierce Brosnan often throwing in lukewarm wisecracks in place of, say, information.
A haphazard and random dip into the seas in search of oddities, Oceans is almost exactly like last year’s IMAX film Under the Sea 3D (minus the 3D), equally beautiful and meaningless, but for the tacked-on environmental messages at the end. Oceans is mildly better at weaving the latter into the last act, with (set up?) shots of collateral kills in fishing nets and plastic-polluted stretches of ocean. In perhaps the most sobering scene of the movie, we see a satellite image of sewage flowing into the open ocean from city rivers.
But really, Oceans is just a wonderfully filmed exercise in “ooo” and “ahh.” There are fish that look like ribbons and squid that look like frilly frocks. Sea creatures are eaten in a nanosecond by other sea creatures that camouflage themselves as rocks, plants, whatever.
Pods of dolphins are exquisitely shot wrangling schools of sardines into edible swarms (manoeuvres that don’t go unnoticed by nearby gulls — who dive in and take advantage of the buffet, the camera following both above and below the surface). As if following a script, a blue whale breaks the surface and leaps into the air in the middle of a circle of cetaceans. The sheer force required to send the largest creature on Earth skyward is humbling to imagine.
The supporting cast includes sharks, sea lions, sea otters (every bit as cute and playful as the freshwater kind), penguins, turtles and polar bears.
It may be that anthropomorphism plays a part in the effectiveness of a movie like Oceans, and if we think of the creatures as characters (as the producers of Earth certainly did), then not enough time is spent to develop an attachment to any of them. We see a bizarre creature; we leave it. We see something even more bizarre; the first bizarre creature is forgotten.
The sheer volume of creature footage probably necessitates that we say hello and go.
This is a movie for children (it opens and closes with a child staring at the ocean in wonder).
Still, children do appreciate a good story. And Oceans is a movie so bursting at the seams with images, it ultimately lacks focus. At a little under an hour-and-a-half, it eventually begins to feel like an overlong trip to a nonetheless incredible zoo.
(This film is rated G)
jim.slotek@sunmedia.ca
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