Oceans

Jacques Perrin and Jacques Cluzaud shot this over four years in more than fifty locations on a budget of around eighty million dollars, a scale rarely seen in nature documentary. Most of it went into technique: underwater cameras that could swim alongside animals, rigs that filmed waves from inside them, and vehicles able to follow sea creatures without startling them. The film chooses showing over telling. Scientific information is kept to a minimum, species often go unnamed, and the viewer is left alone with the movement itself. That is both its most praised and most criticised quality: some found it a pure act of looking, others a spectacle without context. Pierce Brosnan narrates the North American version. It opened on Earth Day, 22 April 2010, in twelve hundred theatres and took around nineteen and a half million dollars in the United States, the third highest opening for a documentary to that point. Who it is for: viewers who want to watch the natural world on a large scale. Who it is not for: anyone wanting information or narrative, both of which the film deliberately keeps in the background.