Saw this last night. It is a remarkable movie, as much as for all the unusual segments. This isn't your Cousteau's clownfish sequence (i.e. UW docu-cliches), although they did touch on cleaning stations and some other standards of the genre. They went out of their way to capture some unusual images. Humpbacks skimming sand bottms in clear tropical blue seas to doing this bizarre body bump en masse in Alaska, back stroking and more. They have some remarkable overhead blue whale surface shots I'm still trying to figure out how they caught. Looks like they used a robust camera boom suspended over the side of some of their vessels. Also, learned animatronics were used for some of the shots. Strobing cuttlefish, mountains of spider crabs lying on each other in OZ, killer whales exploding on to shore grabbing sea lions, white shark aerials, lion and toad fish on the hunt, etc.. Predation is a big part of things but tactfully handled for younger viewers, it seemed that way at any rate. They had some good in water shots of divers with large cetaceans, beneath polar ice as well as lots of closeups of dramatic images from oceans all over really.
Pierce Brosnan did a nice job narrating, weaving some emotion into the tale with abundant facts without falling unduly into pools of smarminess. A risk in this sort of thing. The quality and point of videw of the videography was impressive. Could have sworn they included shots of a decade long solitary female dugong grazing off the SE coast of Egypt in the Red Sea. We saw her their last September. They presented views and commentary on man's impacts on the ocean, stresses, change, resource depletion, by-catch impact, trash diminishment of the polar ice caps but in ways it seems younger and older viewers might appreciate.
From a personal note, aside from some real unuusal images, I was taken by the amount of distressed coral in a number of the sequences (not commented upon) and the lack of insanely, clear blue water typical in years gone by. Even the great viz. segments seemed to have a slight white cast. Could be a product of editing but perhaps not. This is something I've noticed in Florida Current/Gulfstream waters in recent decades, in the Bahamas, Cayman, Cozumel, etc.. More particle loading through warmer conditions, tubidity through dredge and fill, surface runoff, who knows. Seems to be a factor though, worried about the later factors as a teen. Anyway, it is a different, intriguing but still entertaining film worth checking out.
More movie details at:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0765128/
Some of the shots were created with animatronics, accounting for some of the "unusual capture quality";
http://www.if.com.au/2008/11/21/arti...UOPZPXLBM.html