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STUDIO: Warner Home Video
MSRP: $27.98
RATED: G
RUNNING TIME: 41 minutes
SPECIAL FEATURES:
•Filming IMAX: Under The Sea
•Subtitles
The Pitch
Its IMAX: Under The Sea 3D only not in 3D or IMAX! What more could you ask for?
The Humans
Director: Howard Hall
Narrator: Jim Carrey
The Nutshell
Jim Carrey tries his best not to bore us as we’re briskly brought to Papua New Guinea, South Australia, The Great Barrier Reef and Indonesia to experience what life’s like under the sea and what we can do to make sure it keeps on doing what it’s doing, which is eating the hell out of each other.
The Lowdown
The ocean is a big place, full of all kinds of awesome things to look at. It’s very easy to be fascinated by the wonders and life in a world that’s right here with us, but impossible for us to live in. But to really understand it and gather an awareness of how important it is or how many amazing things live there, you really need to spend some time with it. Let it marinate a little bit. No one did it better and no one will ever do it better than BBC with Blue Planet. IMAX: Under the Sea tries to capitalize on the success of BBC’s documentaries but it barely even touches the surface and ends up drowning in a sea of monotony and pulling us down with it by our underpants.
“Good lord! He’s eating the shit out of me. Finding Nemo you done me so wrong!“
IMAX 3D is an amazing thing. There is no way right now to even come close to recreating that kind of picture or experience. It doesn’t matter what you’re seeing. It’s positively jaw dropping at times. The problem here is that we’re dealing with a very brief documentary that was made specifically for that format being released for home viewing. It’s a completely different experience in a completely different environment. It’s reduced to something you throw on to keep the brats from crying and stealing each others toys for half an hour. There’s no doubt they’ll be sucked into the beautiful photography as they’re introduced to things that look like they crawled out of a mad man’s night terror. There’s the giant frog fish. There’s a nautilus, cuttlefish gallore, and of course the under sea staple appearance of the great white shark. They all look crystal clear to the point of convincing me that HD looks better than real life. Jim Carrey isn’t the worst narrator in history. He definitely speaks very clear and concise, but he doesn’t add anything to the feature other than a few corny jokes.
Films like this rely on the “wow factor” and it never gets there. Sure, everything looks and sounds great, but what are we supposed to be excited about? With a few exceptions, there’s nothing here that hasn’t been on a million other Animal Planet programs. It’s all been seen before and without it being in the format it was made for there’s really no reason for this to exist other than to squeeze the last few dollars out of people they can. Take IMAX off the name and you’re left with another show about sea lions. And it would be about 20 smacka-roonies cheaper. This holds up like an ice cream cone in the rain. The most amazing thing about IMAX: Under the Sea is that they somehow managed to make a version of Octopus’s Garden that’s worse than the original. That truly is incredible.
The most terrifying thing ever. I make sure my scuba gear has a euthanasia
button on it just in case something like this happens.
The Package
A 7 minute making of featurette is all they could manage to squeeze on here for some reason. It does the basic run around of how hard it was for them to move the equipment around and how amazing IMAX is. Good thing we’re watching it at home. There are a few interesting things they bring up and it does give you an idea of how much of a pain in the ass this had to be to film and how lucky they got with finding some of the animals they found. But really, why is this $28? That’s just rude.