Unlike last year’s Earth, Disneynature’s latest Earth Day celebration film, Oceans, is just as broad as the title may suggest. With no sense of linearity or specific character to feel compassion for, it’s hard to recommend this movie as a normal time-filler for the weekend.
However, if you haven’t been to the aquarium lately and have a desperate need to see some exotic sea creatures do some weird things, look no further. Oceans does a good job of showing off the often graceful, and sometimes brutal, undersea world, despite some noticeably major faults.
Whereas Earth took a comprehensive view of three animal families, Oceans touches on everything it can, and about 75 percent of the many sequences shown are worthwhile. If you’ve seen one Pacific Life commercial, you’ve already seen a solid five minutes of the movie. If you’ve seen Flipper, there goes another five. Even good ol’ Shamu makes an appearance.
There are a couple other moments like this — they couldn’t help throwing in some penguins. At times, you may find yourself wanting the movie to get past the requisite images and get to the interesting stuff. And to its credit, it does.
At about the 30-minute mark in this 86-minute film, the cameras are brought to the sea floor where some really interesting stuff happens. Massive crab battles take place, and the weirdest creatures on earth are discovered, unsurprisingly, to be doing some off-the-wall shit. A quaint fight between a mantis shrimp and some sort of crab turns out to be one of the most entertaining bits in the entire film.
Oh, and apparently there’s a fish that cleans other fishes teeth for them. They just go inside a bigger fishes mouth and rub their bodies all over it. Pretty cool stuff.
Although the tone of the film remains generally light, this is not a strictly gleeful look at some fantasy ocean world. On the contrary, the directors didn’t hold back on the brutality of the water jungle. Be prepared to see innocent, lovably cute turtles get picked off one by one as they try to get to the water. You all know the story, but in Oceans, you get to see it. Hooray!
There’s even a time when one might laugh at the sick irony of a seal getting gobbled up by a great white shark, right after a joyful section on the seal’s playful lifestyle. Not that your reviewer would be so cold-hearted as to laugh out loud at such a part.
Though showing brutality in the natural world should be applauded, the brutality of pointing fingers at the audience is quite the buzz-kill. The film builds up all this majesty about how wonderful the ocean is, and then, in the home stretch, they make the audience feel like crap by pointing out how we as a species are ruining everything on the earth. Well, they may not go that far — and an issue like endangered species is certainly an important one — but it’s not one that should have been entertained during the movie.
And while the narration is sufficient enough to carry the movie along, the nauseating wistfulness of the actual dialogue coming out of Pierce Brosnan’s mouth makes the finger-pointing all the more worthy of an eye roll.
Words like majesty and grace, beauty and power are thrown about carelessly as though they will force a sense of emotion on the viewer. The movie ends with a laughably poignant statement that, instead of asking what the ocean is, apparently we should first ask who we are instead. It’s borderline patronizing, though funny enough to shrug it off.
While there are some terrible design decisions in the final crafting of this film, whether or not its worth seeing comes down to what kind of viewer you are. For the people who can ignore faults and want to see some sweet animals, go for it, but if you want anything else, really, don’t bother.
diversions@umdbk.com
RATING: 2 stars out of 5
