Sunday, June 27, 2010

The Ocean

Today I saw Disney's documentary The Ocean at the dollar movie theater. The film was made by the same French documentarians who made the gorgeous film Winged Migrations some years back and also made March of the Penguins, both impressive feats of photography and film-making.
Much of this film offered the same sort of astounding images as those earlier films. I was especially impressed by the footage of the blue whale. I have never before seen an actual blue whale, only drawings of these extremely rare and reclusive creatures, which nonetheless, as the narrator said, take up an entire city block. Hard to hide when you're that big, I would imagine!
I had heard on reviews that there was not enough narration, information about what we were looking at. I didn't really find that to be the case. Most of the time I knew what I was looking at, but Pierce Brosnan, the narrator, did provide information most of the time about this anyway.
It was only at the end of the film when the piece seemed to lose direction and repeat itself, getting preachy and then closing with a horrible piece of music that completely clashed with the sublimity of the previous images in the film. It was as though the film were taken away from the director and patched together at the end. Perhaps the film-makers were spending too much for Disney to stomach or taking the film in an unwelcome direction. One never knows what sorts of investments companies like Disney might have that would be sore spots they wanted to cover up. Perhaps that's what happened. In any case, at the dollar movie, the film was well worth seeing, for the rest of its amazing footage of ocean creatures.

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