Breathtaking 'Oceans' skims the surface
If you've seen the TV commercials or theater trailers for "Oceans," you already know what you're in for.
Lots and lots of breathtaking footage of the strange and fascinating creatures that inhabit the world's five oceans.
• Giant whales shoot to the surface, captured in magnificent, awe-inspiring slow-motion.
• Crabs comically climb into their shells to create instant mobile homes.
• A leopard seal tenderly plays with her offspring below thick slabs of white ice.
Like Walt Disney's earlier nonfiction feature "Earth," "Oceans" operates like a "Hooked on Classics" version of nature documentaries. It's not really one movie. It's a greatest hits of a zillion nature films all compressed into a single work.
"Oceans" skips around from one subject to the next, from one ocean to the next, with nimble alacrity. This has both positive and negative consequences.
Directors Jacques Perrin and Jacques Cluzaud (with editors Catherine Mauchain and Vincent Schmitt) move the film briskly along so nobody can possibly be bored.
Yet, many times the sharks and cuttlefish and other creatures prove to be so fascinating, it becomes frustrating to be yanked away to meet the next guest sea critter.
"Oceans" has different narrators for its Japanese, Italian and English releases. Ex-James Bond star Pierce Brosnan narrates the English version. He does his best to pump personality into one of those typical nature doc scripts, oozing with soppy, strained poetic observations.
(Brosnan's comment that a great white shark's fearsome jowls might just be "a smile" really cracked me up. But that's what you get with a script stitched together by a committee of seven writers.)
The most impressive scene? One in which the cameras glide along the sides of a majestic whale before we see a diver next to it, and then truly comprehend the mammoth size of planet's largest mammal.
The most intense scene? One in which hundreds of baby sea turtles have the misfortune of hatching in the sand during daylight hours. They become easy targets for birds that pick off the little guys as they make a mad dash to the safety of the sea.
Run, little turtles! Flap those flippers!
As Brosnan's sympathetic voice tells us, only one out of a thousand baby turtles makes it to the water, just enough to keep the species extant.
It's almost a shame that "Oceans" merely skims the surface of its fascinating deep-sea subjects.
But as a glorified science-class slide show, it's pretty cool.
"Oceans"Rating: #9733; #9733; #9733; A documentary directed by: Jacques Perrin and Jacques CluzaudOther: DisneyNature release. Rated G. 86 minutes