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Review: OCEANS – We Are Movie Geeks

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Review: OCEANS

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The immersion into beauty on display in Disneynature’s second release, OCEANS, is staggering and absolutely undeniable.  Directors Jacques Perrin and Jacques Cluzaud stunned audience with equal amounts of ingenuity in 2001 with WINGED MIGRATION in which they took that audience and transported them into the skies above.  The oceans below are filled with similar wonderments, and the film, though maybe not as groundbreaking as their first collaboration nor as structured as EARTH, Disneynature’s first film, is a masterpiece of visual imagery.  It is a film that shows you things you never thought you would see right alongside things you never even knew existed.

Narrated by Pierce Brosnan, OCEANS takes us to the five oceans that make up 71% of the planet’s surface.  Each of these are home to lifeforms both strange and familiar.  Whether we are witnessing creatures that we’ve seen a dozen times like the great blue whale or the penguins of the Arctic or those we never even knew roamed the oceans like the silky and colorful blanket octopus, we know Perrin and Cluzaud are going to show us something breathtaking.  This they do, time and time again.

But what makes OCEANS more than your standard, television program about life in the deep blue sea, beautiful photography aside, is the abundance with which the directors present their subjects.  The film becomes an onslaught of life, lush with the animals and plant life that make up the ecosystems just under the surface of the water.  However, Perrin and Cluzaud never lose us with nonstop movement between different places in the world, and we begin to see the connections that run from scene to scene.  And they do this all in under 90 minutes, a grand achievement in its own right.  Piling this number of varying scenes together in under an hour and a half must have taken an extraordinary amount of care in the editing room, never mind allowing each scene to breath and live on its own.

One scene in particular showing life along a coral reef at night is ten minutes of sheer brilliance.  It brings on some genuine laughs, as well, as the creatures we watch (some of the stranger ones, at that) seem to go about their daily routine, one crab even taking some time out to clean a bit of house.  Another scene featuring baby green turtles and their trek to the sea is motivating and almost sad to watch, as well, as we watch as dozens of them race towards the water, hungry gulls circling overhead.

The narration by Brosnan doesn’t offer much other than giving us the names of some of the more unfamiliar fish and crustaceans we might not know about.  Brosnan’s narration really comes home, though, late in the film when the subject of pollution and the veins they create into the oceans is broached.  Perrin and Cluzaud, not shying away nor interfering with the way of the world, illicit a sense of disgust and heartbreak as we watch a seal nudging at and puzzling over a rusty shopping cart.  It’s a moment that makes you frown at your fellow man, and more of it may have helped the case OCEANS makes against such pollution.

From there, we move to the arctic where we watch as glaciers and icebergs are breaking apart, the polar bears who use them as home falling into the ocean.  The pains of pollution and global warming are made all the more apparent by the images the directors give us, but it seems to come at an odd time in the film, almost like trying to learn a lesson just after a particularly fun recess.

Nonetheless, the beauty and magnificence of our world is captured from beginning to end with OCEANS.  The technical achievement here is unquestionable.  Whether it is a man swimming right alongside a great white shark, massive whale resting in the water completely upside down, or two converging armies of crabs that turn into a moving floor of shells and legs, OCEANS is a film that takes your breath away with its own beauty and magnificence.

Overall Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars