New technology has made it possible for us to marvel at the beauty of our deepest oceans and even deeper space. We can see lightning below us and a blue whale's almost endless belly glide by above us - in absolute focus. We can see razor fish perform what seems to be a choreographed ballet and we can see a seal inspecting a supermarket trolley on the seabed as our oceans become increasingly polluted.
These are images we all need to marvel and think about.
What we don't need is a script to get all dreamy on us. Don't blame Pierce Brosnan for his lyrical rendition of a terrible text. He's just the hired hand. Blame producer/scriptwriters Jacques Perrin and Jacques Cluzaud who don't seem to understand that the natural world is poetry in itself; the text just needs to arrange the facts.
But then those are organised in such a manner that the evolutionary or conservation lines are neither punted nor ignored; they're just sort of mentioned in passing. In other words, what we have in the French/Spanish/Swiss-produced Oceans is a documentary Europudding.
But see this film for its astonishing visuals and good score by Bruno Coulais, and think of David Attenborough. At least his voice would have given us the facts while his tone would have shared the awe.
Neil Sonnekus
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