You couldn't ask for a more beautiful or spectacular film than this shortened and reedited version of the BBC's Blue Planet series. Now a mere 90 minutes long instead of around seven hours, its purposes are entirely different from those of the television series. It is much more an attempt to astound than to educate - and astound it does as it examines, with few comments, the oceans of the world and its weird and wonderful inhabitants.
A huge army of crabs on the march across a sandy beach; dolphins cavorting in heavy seas; immense shoals of fish forming themselves into gigantic patterns; Emperor penguins huddling en masse against the 20 degrees below zero cold; fishy creatures of the deep looking for all the world like Miro paintings. All this and much more shot in more than 200 locations from 7,000 hours of footage. You couldn't really ask for a much better feast for the eyes.
Yes, Michael Gambon's commentary, not entirely devoid of tongue-rolling clichés (he didn't write it), is no substitute for David Attenborough's more informative effort (cut down here by Alastair Fothergill and Andy Byatt). And I could have done with less of George Fenton's determinedly portentous score underlining how extraordinary are the sights we see: surely we can see that for ourselves.
Deep Blue hasn't the imaginative, dramatic thrust of last year's Winged Migration, or even of the earlier Microcosmos. But it is shot just as well, even if we often want to know more about what we see.
In one of the few facts we are vouchsafed, we are told that the deepest ocean is seven miles down, with life at the bottom of it. It is equally difficult to credit some of the creatures of the oceans. And the fact that they spend most of the time eating each other is only a slight put-off.
Deep Blue
Cert: PG
