"DEEP BLUE"
DVD Review
by Kevin Carr
| MOVIE: ***1/2 (out of 5 stars)
DVD EXPERIENCE: *1/2 (out of 5 stars) Rated G Studio: Miramax Directed by: Alastair Fothergill and Andy Byatt Back to DVD Review Home |  |
After “The March of the Penguins” became a sleeper hit last year, it seems that everyone is cashing in on our little Antarctic friends. They’re the subject of a new CGI film later this year (“Happy Feet,” with one of the birds being voiced by Robin Williams), and they were cleverly put on the cover of the Miramax DVD release of “Deep Blue.”
This marketing strategy is effect, to be sure. When I got a copy of “Deep Blue,” my five-year-old son took one look at the cover and exclaimed, “It’s the penguin movie!”
Sure, there may be an emperor penguin on the cover with its chick, but don’t expect the film to be all about the flightless waterfowl. This is just the marketing whizzes at Disney working their magic. The penguins are a part of the film, only a small portion. In the movie, you get a condensed version of “The March of the Penguins,” showing how the birds travel to the center of the frozen wilderness in the winter to hatch their eggs.
However, the movie is larger than the penguins. It tackles the entire ocean, thus the appropriate title “Deep Blue.” Cut together from the landmark BBC series “The Blue Planet,” “Deep Blue” features the best of the best from the show’s nature documentary footage.
Yes, it is a nature documentary, and the information you find inside may not be anything more than you haven’t garnered from watching Animal Planet, but it is an extremely well made and well shot piece. Covering the scope of the ocean itself, the movie spans two poles (focusing on penguins in the Ancarctic and polar bears in the arctic). It dives beneath the surface to examine the lifes of everything from sharks to jellyfish, and it also comes topside to look at seals, crabs and albatross.
I grew up without the benefit of cable, and we had only a mere 12-inch black-and-white television, so my memories of watching nature documentaries on the tube were not that spectacular. With DVD (and a bevy of science-oriented cable, withe some programming offered in HD), this is a new way to bring the wonders of nature to the whole family.
The only drawback of “Deep Blue” is that it has too wide of a focus. We see so much, we can get overwhelmend. I would imagine that the original BBC series doesn’t fall into this trap, but the scope of the condensed film can be a bit overwhelming.
Included on the DVD is an extensive documentary about the making of the film. More about the journey of the filmmakers to capture nature, this piece shows the patience, trust and stamina that the crew faced. Sometimes we don’t realize what it takes to get the spactacular footage, and it’s a nice little feature that reminds us that it takes a lot of work to put something like this together.
Specifications: Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround Sound. Widescreen (1.86:1), enhanced for 16x9 televisions. Spanish subtitles. English language subtitles for the hearing impaired.
