![]() In the original French version, which runs over 100 minutes, the director Perrin reportedly wanders through the film with his curious grandson, explaining to him the beauty and fragility of the natural world, and the current and future consequences of mankind’s ongoing pollution of the oceans and destructive commercial fishing practices. “A miraculous mixture of matter and energy,” we are told, that “continues to feed us body and soul, the source of our greatest stories and legends” a place where life began “with a splash of sunlight and color.” In the end, “instead of asking what exactly the ocean is, we should be asking who exactly we are.” Things get off to a rocky start with ponderous What Is The Ocean musings about how the mysteries of the sea are deeper than book learning and must be experienced first-hand. If anything, Oceans tips in the other direction, with occasionally clunky attempts at narrative impressiveness. Oceans avoids this pitfall, partly because Brosnan’s reserved manner won’t permit lines like “Get down, baby” (though he does crack a joke about cleaner fish and how it’s “never a good idea to swallow your dental hygienist”). Oceans is more traditional, with sustained running commentary - though it’s less intrusive than in Earth, which tried too hard to appeal to family audiences with humorous informality. Winged Migration was in that tradition, though lightly annotated with an awkward combination of occasional voiceovers and subtitles. Some of my favorite nature docs - Luc Besson’s Atlantis, Claude Nuridsany and Marie Pérennou’s Microcosmos (produced by Perrin) - get by with essentially no narration at all, simply grooving on the beauty of the natural world (why are they always made by the French?). And my new favorite freaky thing, supplanting the anatomical absurdity of the leafy seadragon, is the wack-eyed mantis shrimp, a testy little fellow who gets violently territorial with crabs loitering around his front door - as one learns to its grief. The colorful silken splendor of the blanket octopus and the ribbon eel were a surprise to me (nicely complemented by the Spanish dancer sea slug). The unprecedented spectacle of a blue whale feeding on krill, its ventral pouch inflated with water, is breathtaking (you never see blue whales in these things humpbacks get all the glory). Nature docs thrive on firsts, though, and Oceans has some eye-poppers. (Such scenes of predation are pretty tame at one point the proximity of orcas and humpbacks made me fear a repeat of the harrowing scenario from “Blue Planet” of orcas harrassing a mother humpback to exhaustion before leaving her calf’s half-eaten carcass to sink to the ocean floor - but rest assured that doesn’t happen here.) And of course dolphins leap, penguins torpedo and sea lions cavort to the delight of all and sundry. Nature doc lovers will meet plenty of old friends in Oceans: a mother humpback whale lifting her calf to the surface for a breath of air newly emerged turtle hatchlings herky-jerking over the expanse of sand toward the sea while swooping frigatebirds pick them off at their leisure orcas surging alarmingly out of the surf to snatch fur seals from the shallows. An early shot of a marine iguana undulating toward the surface hugs the lizard so closely that I scribbled “iguana-cam!” in my notes. Wider in scope and subject matter, Perrin and Cluzaud’s new film is no less breathtakingly up-close and personal with its subjects. ![]() It’s a sequel to Jacques Perrin and Jacques Cluzaud’s 2001 hit Winged Migration, which insinuated audiences with startling intimacy into the midst of flocks of waterbirds in flight. In fact, Oceans comes from the other side of the Channel.
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