Aliens of the Deep

Worms nearly two meters long, blind crabs, a bio-mass of white shrimp. James Cameron takes the viewer on a journey to another world, an incredible underwater adventure that gives an extraordinary look at incredible creatures that live in an alien world, without sunlight, and where the water can be close to freezing or boiling temperature. Could these alien life forms be clues about life on other planets?

I was expecting something more terrifying, visually beautiful, narratively poetic, scientifically necessary, cute and cool... Long and a little boring or I just wasn't in the mood for this cute undersea movie... Beautiful images, beautiful soundtrack, boring theme, and boring... It didn't flow...

"Yeah, hi, this is Jim... Yeah, Cameron... The genius who paired up Winslet and Di Caprio for that awful TITANIC movie... No, Mr.Markowitz, I don't have time to explain why I cast a skinny effeminate nerd, that's not why I called you, I'm a busy man... Listen, I need some scientists for an underwater documentary... A-ha... Charles, John, Mike... Well, no, actually I was thinking more of women, you see. I want this to be a politically correct film, so get me some female marine biologists. That way I have a better shot at getting a prestigious award. Have you got any?... You do? Great. A black- I mean, an African-American girl with Bob Marley hair? Excellent! What's more hip than that!? I'll get her to narrate a bulk of the movie... No, no, nevermind her credentials, I don't need them... She's just a student? Who cares... just send her and the other gals over."

In making this solid documentary, James Cameron behaved more like an actor than a director, i.e. someone who is always behind the camera. The major flaw of AOTD is that we see far too many shots of Jim and his dull female science team, and too little of the fascinating deep-ocean creatures which Cameron promised. Who cares to listen to the crews go "wow!" and "unbelievable!" every five minutes? The viewer is supposed to say it or think it, not these dull scientific clowns. The narration sounds flat, usually coming in form of barely audible, weak female voices. One of these narrators is a scientist who actually left her 5-month old infant to be on this expedition. Are we supposed to be impressed by her career ambitions? How very feminist. But I suppose Cameron was so adamant about having nearly all the scientists be women that he didn't even care about separating a mother from her infant.

I thought that the focus occasionally shifting on space exploration was a good idea, but there was too little of real scientific info of that nature. Too much screen time goes to waste on showing us the logistical difficulties of sending these subs down - as if anyone apart from engineers cares. Show me a fish with teeth like Edward Fox! That's what it's all about...

If you want a truly awe-inspiring documentary on deep-sea critters, check out "The Blue Planet": one of the six episodes delivers what Cameron here only partly manages to do.

Perhaps Cameron wants to be the next Jacque Cousteau, who was a self-centered egomaniac who pretended to only care about the preservation of nature when in fact it was exhibitionistic self-promotion that was always in the forefront. Damn, I'm tired of all these hyped-up idealists/humanists getting rich at the expense of our collective naivety.

So, this is an odd one. "Aliens of the Deep" is clearly designed to be viewed on an IMAX screen - which, of course, I wasn't. I was watching it on my TV via Disney Plus. So , visually it's not as impressive as old James Cameron intended - but as a documentary, how is it? Too long, and only interesting about half the time.

Veteran film director James Cameron continues his obsession with all things deep sea by arranging an expedition, to the hydrothermal vents and investigate the life that thrives in such toxic and inhospitable environments. Accompanying the marine biologists are a team of NASA scientists eager to learn what they can about the technology needed to explore similarly difficult terrain in Space.

When I say it's interesting half the time, I mean it's interesting when it's showing their actual discoveries. The vents have their own ecosystems linked to the heat generated by the superheated water, shrimp and crab like creatures exist in large numbers and tube worms mix around the deep sea submersibles. They experiment with taking samples of rocks and with how close they can get to the vents.

It's less interesting when it's using CGI to imagine creatures during fantasies about what it might be like to explore the seas of another planet. I guess the idea is that it's supposed to fire your imagination, but for me it was mostly padding what was already a slow-moving experience. It doesn't spend anything like enough time doing the actual interesting thing it does, showing you the actual creatures that live in these environments. The human stories of the scientist are generally a bit dull, though some of the film detailing the issues that the expedition has are more interesting.

I've spent a lot of time with space and undersea documentaries recently and unfortunately, despite some decent moments, this is a bit of a misfire.

I did not see the IMAX version, so maybe that makes a difference. I just watched the DVD, which was long. However, it seems like a lot of people did not get the point of this movie, which was absolutely excellent and very exciting. We are on the frontier of a lot of exciting discoveries, and leaps and bounds are being made in marine exploration.

People complain that the animals shown were not explained enough. That's because THEY DON'T KNOW WHAT IT IS. They say "Oooh, look at that! Wow! What is it?". This is exploration, people. They are finding new types of animals. If they can't capture it, they are going to have to take pictures of it and study how it moves etc. etc. and go through a long process of figuring out what it is and how it lives.

The point of this movie wasn't necessarily to show pretty pictures of all of the animals, although I was stunned by the visual beauty of it. The point was to tie marine exploration to space exploration, hence the title. I loved seeing what goes on with the machinery and finding out all of the different people involved in this research, showing us all the different groups that come together from different fields to explore together and work on their individual goals. A lot of people complained that they didn't want to see the engineers and the subs and robots, but the people who do that incredible work should get more credit than they often do and should definitely be introduced in the movie. This technology is absolutely amazing and the people who do it deserve to brag. They are showing us the incredible things that the human mind can achieve. I also loved seeing how excited they were.

This movie has a lot of very important things to say and did a great job illustrating the massive activity going on in this sector of science. Not only has it made me enthused about the things I'm going to see in my lifetime, it has made me believe that one of those things is probably going to be life on another planet.

After day after day of being depressed about the state the world is in, petty political and religious arguments, seeing this movie definitely made me feel hope for the human race again. These people put most of us to shame. This movie doesn't deserve to get blasted the way it has been and these brilliant folks don't deserve to be called "retards". How silly! So maybe you don't like the way it looked, or thought they should have done something different. Whatever. These guys are ridiculously hardworking, are doing amazing things, and are trying to show the world and let us get in on it. Geez. People just love to insult things.

Unfortunately most of the film gets terribly lost in boring exposition about the technology and erroneous dialogue. The narrator's lack of real scientific knowledge is painfully obvious as she struggles to read her script (with the occasional exclamations of "wow" or "that's amazing.) The various scientists' excruciating descriptions of technology sadly detract from the real stars of the show (the actual animal life), which the viewer will see only infrequently. A much better example of deep ocean cinematography can be found in the BBC series titled The Blue Planet narrated by David Attenborough and other related BBC titles. If you are watching with kids hoping to inspire their curiosity about science then PLEASE give this title a miss and move on to something that won't bore them to death.