Search - The Living Sea (IMAX) on DVD

"the cradle of life"

Alejandra Vernon | Long Beach, California | 06/27/2003

(5 out of 5 stars)

"This is an educational film which also has hypnotically beautiful visuals and a lovely score put together by composer Steve Wood that includes a lot of music and vocals by Sting, as well as having Meryl Streep give us a stream of information in her well-spoken narration.
It documents the sea and its creatures, and also how people connect with it, either for pleasure, commerce, or survival. We get to see the Coast Guard boat traveling through 15 foot waves, some outstanding surfing footage, and how the inhabitants of the West Pacific island of Palau interact and respect the water that surrounds them.One one level one can use this film to learn some facts about the ocean, and on another, one can sit back and enjoy the wonderful cinematography. Fascinating parts include the jellyfish in Palau, the Monterrey Bay Aquarium Research Institute showing us a Siphonophore, which is about half the size of a football field, and visible through their underwater probe, and of course, the whales !The film is 40 minutes long, and the video contains a 27 minute "Making of" documentary, which has interviews with Producer/Director Greg MacGillivray, among others, like photographer Howard Hall describing the difficulty of filming in water.
I found this documentary particularly interesting, and think it deserves 5 stars, because it gave me knowledge I did not have before, and the filmmakers made some painstaking efforts to bring it to us, like the timelapse photography of the tides. It was nominated for a 1995 Best Documentary Short Subject Academy Award, and seeing it is definitely time well spent."