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Screen Scene: “Oceans”

By Alex Goodman

April 22, 2010 9:04 p.m.

The age of high-definition video is apparently also the age of the nature documentary. It’s a genre with potential, thanks to the endless number of fascinating creatures and environments on this planet, but Disney has come late to the game with “Oceans,” and it has come with no particularly special tricks up its sleeve.

This is the second consecutive Earth Day release from the newly hatched Disneynature label; last year’s was called, appropriately enough, “Earth.” These ultra-generic titles are presumably supposed to imply that the documentaries are definitive and exhaustive. But if they’re not ““ and “Oceans” is certainly not ““ well, then the more appropriate implication is that they’re bland and superficial.

Instead of a cohesive story, the film is bookended by a narrative frame as silly as a clown fish: a young boy standing on the beach and staring wistfully out toward the horizon. In between is a long series of short vignettes, showcasing sea creature after lovable sea creature.

There are three kinds of breathtaking images in “Oceans.” There is the massive kind, the enormous, swarming schools of fish. There is the strange kind, the bizarre forms of the horseshoe crab and the blanket octopus. And there is the brutal kind, the orca whales snatching up seals in their jaws. Then there is a subgenre ““ the cute ““ which basically includes shots of baby animals with their mothers.

These scenes come in waves, many of them awe-inspiring or at least “aww”-inducing, but there is no context for them, and there is nothing you couldn’t explore in greater detail in BBC’s award-winning series “Blue Planet.”

Pierce Brosnan narrates as if he’s providing captions ““ he rarely says anything very insightful, and the best moments usually come when he shuts up and lets the images speak for themselves. A line such as, “The ocean has continued to feed us, body and soul, the source of our greatest stories,” would sound ridiculous no matter what, but Brosnan’s voice, with an unavoidably sly and snarky quality to it, churns up a tidal wave of absurdity. Next to the great whales of narration ““ James Earl Jones, who did “Earth,” and Morgan Freeman, who did “March of the Penguins,” ““ Brosnan is only a sardine.

But there is a far more egregious problem with “Oceans,” and it has to do with us ““ specifically, what we are doing to the oceans. Human beings are almost entirely absent from the film (not counting the men and women behind the cameras), which, in a more thoughtful movie, might implicitly argue that the sea is no place for us. In such a sterile, determinedly inoffensive production, though, it instead dishonestly pretends that the oceans are carrying on as if we didn’t exist.

Brosnan briefly explains that from space, we can track the spread of pollution through the water, followed by a shot of a seal scrutinizing a grocery cart that has landed on the ocean floor. He mentions that the animals cannot fight for their own environment, but most of the section about the North and South Poles focuses on the fact that life still flourishes there. That boy standing on the beach can look all he wants, but someone’s covering his eyes.

About halfway through “Oceans,” a bale of baby sea turtles race for the water, their flippers flailing frantically. A flock of frigate birds circles overhead, and then they dive, picking off all but one of the turtles. It’s a gripping, visceral moment, but mostly it just serves as a reminder of how tame everything else is.

Next Earth Day, Disneynature will present “African Cats,” but don’t expect to see any teeth.

E-mail Goodman at [email protected].

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