Oceans Movie Review

By Anne Brodie Apr 23, 2010, 15:14 GMT

A ecological documentary exploring the ocean depths. ...more

Sometimes it seems cinema was invented so that films like Océans can be made.  With its ability to see very small and very big things, to convey unexpected emotion, to present the drama of being alive and part of our universe, Océans must be considered a ground breaking, historic film.

It opens as a young boy stands on a shore and wonders about the sea in front of him.  We see and hear majestic crashing waves and are taken inside them.  They are big and menacing and they do what they do all the time, as we clutch our phones and lattes.  We forget the world we are in and the film reminds us.

One crew spent 200 days waiting for a whale shot; I didn’t know which one.  It could have been any of three or four sequences that were as grand and moving as any nature documentary, if not the best that I’ve seen.  The question we ask throughout the film is ‘how did they do it?’  How did cameras get inside the vast marine world, get their stunning images that make us feel we are traveling beside massive sea creatures, inches away from a powerful lizard that is as arresting in appearance, as he is fast.  The cameras are there at the right moments, as parasites latch onto their rides, inside it and out, as mother sea lions clasp their babies to them, as creatures are born.

There’s a line that narrator Pierce Brosnan delivers that sums up the thrust of the film, that under the sea, nature tries everything.  The creatures we see in the oceans are almost impossible to comprehend.  Some are stirringly beautiful, some are repulsively hideous; they represent the world’s living underwater circus.  Wild colours, textures and forms are the norm – nothing is ordinary.  It’s a feast for the eyes and the heart.  Flying dragons, rockfish, silk scarves are just a few of the dozens of species we meet.

We are taken on board ships struggling to navigate fearsome storms, and inside swirling funnels of living beings, and a huge battle between two armies of crayfish.  A doe-eyed seal stares fixedly at the camera underwater with curiosity.  We’re shown creatures reacting to the camera, some do doubletakes, some look up and notice, but keep on their way, and some run from it.  But the little seal’s eyes stare into the camera and into ours in a moment of wrenching inter species recognition.

There is attention paid to creatures in the danger of extinction and man’s terrible interference in ther life of the sea and the subsequent collateral deaths, like the dolphins and turtles that get stuck in the tuna nets in Italy, and the garbage that forces animals to extend their hunting grounds beyond what they know.  One shocking sequence features a seal examining a shopping cart at the bottom of the ocean, a wet junkheap, as human debris – bleach bottles, sheet plastic and more – obliterates the light.

But the film doesn’t dwell on the threats that we are, showing us instead what a valuable resource the oceans are; to make us fall in love with it and its creatures and do something  to protect its future.

Océans has been called a documentary and a drama, which is fair.  The drama comes from so many aspects of the film, our place in nature, the world we can’t see that lives and thrives under the surface of the water, the struggle to survive.  A group of just hatched sea turtles sprints from the nest to the sea but all but one are eaten by hovering birds, the aforementioned crab fight, and it is drama at its finest and most primal.

Striking images remain long after the film ends - like the flock of birds that dive into the ocean to pick off small fish, the vastness of the whale’s body and its life, a cameraman swimming alongside a shark in absolutely no danger, dolphins playing exuberantly in the water - so many moments.

Océans is a haunting, brave, astonishing and glorious experience that is impossibel to forget.  Its part of Disney’s nature series, the first was Earth and the next will be the African Cats.  We are lucky that such a series has been undertaken, because too often we forget that we share the world with beautiful, mysterious and hopefully undending varieties of life.

Written by Christophe Cheysson, Jacques Cluzaud, Jacques Perrin et al
Directed by Jacques Perrin and Jacques Cluzaud
Opens: April 22
MPAA:?
Runtime: 100 minutes
Country: France, Switzerland, Spain, Morocco
Language: English