Blue Water, White Death

Ahoy... I was in Wood's Hole, MA this weekend and was fortunate to be at the screening of this flick in HD. It is an interesting film, with many memorable moments and beautiful ( and sometimes horrifying ) photography and images. The film standing alone is passable, and seems campy within our current cultural frame of reference. However, watching in context, you realize this was the ancestor to many of those glossy animal shows we all love. In general, shoddy craftsmanship technically, but very real. I would recommend it to anyone interested in the genre. In a nutshell, it's allegedly where "Jaws" came from. Dare I say it 're-mystifies' the Great White Shark, and our re-introduction is a brutal experience.

The wealthy Peter Gimble, model for Mr. Hooper of Jaws, hires a ship and a crew and staffs it with a truly mixed bag of professional underwater naturalists and photographers (and one folk singer) and sets off in pursuit of the great white shark. By the film's midpoint, cast and crew are in open mutiny. Peter Mathiessen, hired as voyage historian, thought the product of the trip would be the world's most expensive home movie but it is considerably more interesting, detailing in surprisingly vivid terms some real highs and lows for a trip that is part carnival, part nature study. Contrary to expectations, the most striking sequence involves not a great white shark but a group of sharks (primarily blues) feeding on a sperm whale carcass. By exiting the shark cages and photographing the feeding up close, the divers raised the bar considerably on this kind of filming. There are also memorable moments as when Stan Waterman and Valerie Taylor struggle through high seas to get back aboard the boat and Mr. Waterman promises the cameraman that if he ever films them struggling like that again without helping them, he will find himself in the water with them. The sequences involving the great white are not surprisingly very striking. I suspect there was a little after-action photography added to the sequence showing Peter Lake trying to cut the rope holding the great white to his cage. A minor point in a great film. There are also some great moments under the credits, my favorite being Stan Waterman describing how to drive off a shark with a SCUBA knife. A real treat if you ever get to see this.

It's amazing that when this movie was made, no one has ever filmed a great white before. And it's only been about 40 years since this movie was made.

When I first started taking scuba diving lesson, this movie was all the rage of town. There just wasn't any movie that had shark cage in it before this one. I think this was also the first movie to feature "chumming" technique to lure the sharks. My friends were telling me how huge the sharks were. Later I found out that it wasn't so big, but still it's a really big fish. Did Peter Benchley get his idea from this movie when he wrote "JAWS" ?

This was a ground breaking movie that raised the bar on underwater documentary features. In every underwater documentary there's little bit of influence from this movie. It's also amazing how much more we've learned in such a short time since this movie was made, mostly due to ubiquity of underwater filming.

A very important movie historically in the annals of underwater documentaries.

We in this fragile world of ours should do whatever is necessary to educate, everyone, children, parents, etc. We must at all costs, not eliminate these great sharks, that have been put into the oceans for many ions. If we out of ignorance, or greed, destroy these magnificent animals, we will regret our actions. For once they are gone forever, the balance in our oceans will create havoc. No more predators to control the all the seal families: Example: (sea animals with flippers.) Once we create an imbalance such as this, we will not survive as the human race. Beside Blue Water, White Death, there have been many other documentaries on this subject, if we choose not to learn from the past, we will have no future.

I saw this movie when I was 12. It was the movie that sparked my interest in sharks and the ocean. I have dived with 1000's of sharks in my life and I remain devoted to their salvation. I would pay a lot of money for a copy of the film or a tape of it. I have tried to locate it a number of times. This film needs to be saved and preserved for all time. It is the most important film on the subject of sharks ever made because it is the first of it's kind. It contains historic footage of whaling and the first search and filming of The Great White Shark. This movie is why I became a diver and a dive instructor. This movie needs to be seen by people for years to come.