Beautiful Oceans a Watery Marvel
As stated by Oceans co-director Jacques Cluzaud states in the production notes, the goal of the filmmakers with their undersea documentary was to wait with their cameras long enough until they became, “a fish among fish.” To say he and fellow director Jacques Perrin succeeded would be a massive understatement. By the time this briskly paced motion picture came to its conclusion I sat there in awe, and much like the pair’s miraculous Winged Migration made me feel as if I was soaring through the clouds this new film took me to such wondrous depths it was almost as if I had grown gills during the screening.
The undersea world outside of the Yongala Wrek, Townsville Australia as seen in Disneynature’s Oceans
Movies like this one tend to be all about how they make a viewer feel and Oceans truly showed me sights that stopped my breath and made my heart soar. There are underwater ballets featuring schools of fish, packs of dolphins and flocks of birds that defy description and must simply be seen to be believed. This mealtime footage of prey and predators isn’t just remarkable, it’s simply breathtaking, and it’s only one moment of many that had me holding my breath in wonder.
Perrin and Cluzaud structure things in a way that is visceral instead of clinical, and while they are constructing a narrative (movingly told by omnipresent 2010 actor Pierce Brosnan in his voiceover) they are doing so in a way that grips the emotions just as deftly as it tickles the mind. There is intelligence here, there is information being passed on to the viewer, but it comes in a way that feels subtle not professorial, and almost as if by osmosis I learned much almost about the oceans of the Earth almost without realizing it.
I had a lot of favorite moments, the chief of the probably the one I described above. But a Great White montage is beyond stunning, while a sequence of newborn baby Sea Turtles making a mad daylight dash for the sea as flocks of birds pick them off one by one put a lump in my throat so huge I almost choked.
Yet all of the footage is beyond belief, so much so it is easy to see why it has taken the filmmakers nearly seven years to compile everything together. More than that, their movie does not preach. Yes they point out how humans have impacted the oceanic environment. Of course they show once again how global warming is putting the entire planet on the path to peril. But they do these things in a way that doesn’t hit adults over the head while also explaining it in a way even the youngest of viewers can’t help but understand. This a movie that takes – and please forgive the wording – a global view in how it looks at things, believing people can change while celebrating the animals who are impacted so greatly by this collective behavior.
I will admit I could have done without the penguins, not so much because the footage isn’t magnificent (it is) but more because I’m just personally penguin-ed out. I also wish the filmmakers would have spent a little more time going even deeper into the depths of the oceans, the mysteries of those dark netherworlds hundreds of fathoms below still as unknown to me after the film had ended as they were before it began.
These are minor complaints. Perrin and Cluzaud have crafted a magnificent document chronicling our world’s ever-changing seas in way that is both breathtaking and eye-popping. I was mesmerized right from the very start, and by the time it was over it was all I could do to not ask the publicist representing the picture to not have the projectionist start it over so I could watch it again. A magnificent epic, Oceans is a watery marvel the likes of which I usually go to be and dream about yet seldom get the opportunity to see.
Film Rating: êêê1/2 (out of 4)
