Nature documentaries are essentially clip shows: For every minute of animal action, camera crews typically spend hours in the wild waiting for a cinematic burst of activity. The ocean exploration Deep Blue takes the conceit one step further, by constructing a clip show from a clip show: Years of footage went into the BBC miniseries The Blue Planet, and for Deep Blue, Planet producers Andy Byatt and Alastair Fothergill trimmed their footage down to 83 minutes, putting together a breathtaking best-of showreel that not only presents nature as a nonstop thrill ride, but also makes being a dolphin seem like the most fun going.
From the opening shots of crashing waves set to sweeping orchestral music, Deep Blue proclaims itself as a live-action Fantasia, an expressive collection of images rather than an educational outing. Pierce Brosnan's narration is minimal, and rarely informative: While the footage was collected all over the world, the film rarely identifies where a given sequence was shot, or even what viewers are seeing. Instead, Brosnan mouths bland, generalized statements like "This is a world of constant jeopardy, an endless cycle of birth, death, and renewal," or "The ocean welcomes the sun, the only force capable of waking sea life." Given the incredible range of forms which that life takes, the approach can be maddening; there's no need to name every creature and define every behavior, but when a pallid, Lovecraftian organism made entirely out of tentacles is flailing across the screen, it'd be nice if the film offered some explanation, instead of New Agey claptrap about the power of the moon and the mystery of night. The 2001 French documentary Winged Migration took a similarly talk-light approach, with similarly restricted success, but Deep Blue lacks that film's organizing principle; it doesn't track any particular animal behavior, it just throws out one random amazing sequence after another, effectively proclaiming "Fish are nifty."
Not that the film limits its attention to fish, though its segments on penguins, polar bears, and albatross colonies are less eye-catching than its awe-inducing trip to the Marianas Trench, or its observation of an immense shoal of shifting silver fish being devoured simultaneously by birds, sharks, and dolphins. Byatt and Fothergill have the aesthetics of fireworks-show programmers; they rarely focus on a single animal when they can fill an entire screen with dazzling crowds of creatures, and they pack their feature with slow-motion, time-lapse, and helicopter shots, the better to stun the audience into gaping submission. Deep Blue is a thrilling film, but not a thoughtful one; it'd be right at home on an IMAX screen, or possibly as the pretty, polished, and vaguely empty Successories poster it closely resembles.