Deep Sea 3D: Anything but a damper

Deep Sea 3D, now on at IMAX, provides a peek into the fascinating world of marine life.

BY A CORRESPONDENT

7 March 2006
MUMBAI, INDIA

This Saturday, the newest film to hit the IMAX screen was Howard Hall's Deep Sea 3D, a 40 minute undersea documentary that gives a closer than reality look at the wonders of marine life, namely sharks and eels. With a total of 67 different animal species filmed in nine undersea locales, the movie promises to be anything but a damper.

An exciting encounter with a 14-foot Tiger Shark provides the highlight for the film, which uses three dimensional glasses to enhance the experience in what promises to be an adrenaline-boosting tour of diverse ocean wildlife. Deep Sea 3D captures the fragile balance between predator and prey, the hungry octopi, unflappable mantis shrimp, the sea turtles looking for a shell wash, all living in a complex symbiotic relationship with each other.

The action is narrated by none other than Johnny Depp and Kate Winslet. The film focuses less on the exotic element, and attempts to give a sense of the life bubbling underneath the water, putting in relief the destructive effects that humanity ends up causing on the marine environment.

According to the makers of Deep Sea 3D, every three minutes of footage might have taken as much as two hours of work. While the film captures rides on danger in terms of what is happening on screen, shooting the film has not been a tame affair either. Hall and his crew had to avoid three hurricanes while shooting in the Sea of Cortez (Hurricane Javier) and the Gulf of Mexico (Hurricane Katrina).

A wide variety of aquatic fauna, manta rays gliding in circles in search of food, a shrimp fighting off an octopus, and a fascinating light show by the colour-changing skin of the Humboldt squid are some of stars of this aquatic blockbuster. Orchestral music by Danny Elfman marks time beautifully, while time itself stands still at one hour after sunset eight days past the full August moon when the filmmakers caught corals spawning en masse.