All the crystalline imagery & poetic immediacy that they have come to expect from this new generation of up-close-and-personal nature documentaries is here. Horseshoe crabs scuttle like possessed Nazi helmets & a school of fish morphs from dreidel to disco ball, as if choreographed by Busby Berkeley.
After wowing us in the skies with “Winged Migration,” the two Jacques (Perrin & Cluzaud) are back to entice us to gaze in the opposite direction. In “Oceans,” Disneynature’s reconstitution of the 2009 French release “Océans,” the filmmakers venture in, on & around our seas to discover photogenic oddities & endangered wonders.
Moving from the infinitesimal to the gargantuan — from sea urchin larvae to 120-ton blue whales — the filmmakers work tirelessly to parallel their undersea world with the larger universe, offering genteel reminders of our mutual dependence.
Playing down the cruel (child turtles running the gantlet of dive-bombing frigate birds) without overdoing the cute (a mommy-and-me walrus cuddle-fest), “Oceans” is very soothing.
Reviews of the original film suggest a harsher environmental message (for example, a sequence showing several extinct species has, um, disappeared), but the poor bluefin tuna have survived the Disneynature editors if not the nets of bottom-trawling fishing boats. In any case, that lone supermarket cart sitting forlornly on the ocean floor says it all.
“Human indifference is surely the oceans’ greatest threat,” murmurs Pierce Brosnan’s excruciatingly bland narration while images of the garbage patch in the North Pacific Gyre float on screen.
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