MovieGuy109
Jacques Perrin and Jacques Cluzaud direct this documentary about marine life with beautiful images of underwater life. You may see something like this on the National Geographic channel, which downgrades the originality of the picture but Brosnan provides excellent narration and these kind of images never die in our minds and it is always lovely to see them again. The nature curious will certainly find something to love and others should to. It's a relaxing meditation and is perfect for kids or adults. The best part is that the film remains a humble length and resists growing ploys for self-indulgence. Only the unnecessary prologue narrative is a bit annoying. Other than that, a bulls eye.
winstonnc-1
It's important to note there are TWO versions of this film. Jacques Perrin's original runs 104 minutes and is narrated by Perrin in French. Disney bought the film, cut 20 minutes (much of it critical of human activity endangering the oceans and animal habitats), junked Perrin's spare narration, which lets you wonder at the sights on view, and substituted a gabby but emotionally chilly commentary by Pierce Brosnan.Perrin's original version is not available in the US, per contract with Disney. The original is available in Europe on DVD and Blu-Ray (but unplayable on most US machines) but it seems to lack English subtitles. So you're pretty much stuck with Disney edition.The original, however, is to my mind better and much more in line with Perrin's "Winged Migration" than the Disney version. The best that can be said for the US edition is that plays down the "humanizing" of animal life that was an annoy hallmark of Disney's True-Life Adventures of the 1950s.
Peter Grunbaum
Great movie with some stunning imagery from the oceans, but, like other reviewers have pointed out, why do we have to see all the sentimental stuff? It didn't help the narrative. The ocean is about the ocean. We go in to see a movie about the ocean. Period. There was a lot of stuff in this movie that was not related to that subject. The beauty of documentarism is precisely that it is different from fiction, therefore I find it lacking in focus to use actors to get a point across. Actors belong in the theater and fictitious movies. But the imagery from the ocean was great. It was just a bit hard to enjoy when, at any moment, they might cut to something else. Anyway, pretty good movie, with some really amazing stuff from the sea.
zardoz-13
"Oceans" qualifies as a visual spectacle of the sea and its zillions of inhabitants in all shapes, sizes, and colors serving one purpose or another and sometimes winding up as the snack of a bigger occupant. The scenes of the baby sea turtles scrambling in broad daylight across the sands only to be snatched up by the frigate birds; the scenes of the dolphins feeding on an underwater tapestry of tuna along with other predators, like birds, participating in the feast; and the scenes of stone fish sucking absent-minded damsel fish down makes this documentary, narrated by Pierce Brosnan, a hypnotic experience. Clocking in at 84 minutes, co-directors Jacques Perrin and Jacques Cluzaud make this documentary experience of marine life an interesting aquatic epic. Everything boils down to a confrontation between other species and the film breaks down into a series of stories about encounters. The cinematography is terrific. The scene of opposing armies of spider crabs marching toward each other in a frontal assault almost looks like the spiders in "Starship Troopers." The monstrously huge blue whales sliding through the depths of the deep are poetic. Shots of penguins lunge up out of the ocean through cracks in the ice still look just as fresh and exciting as they did before in other documentaries. Eventually, Perrin and Cluzaud cannot resist the temptation to make a statement about human pollution of the ocean. Satellites photograph the path of pollution from the rivers into the ocean."Oceans" is great to look at, but it is designed as a generalist form of entertainment. Indeed, the visuals overshadow the narrative, despite Pierce Brosnan evocative line readings. For the record, Perrin and Cluzaud spent four years lensing this atmospheric homage to the sea.
AD
