Géants des profondeurs 3D - Une aventure préhistorique

Watching "Sea Monsters" at the Omnimax was a real letdown. The film was woefully dull, its creators believing that a reel's worth of CG-animated water creatures is enough to carry a film. The few acting segments were stilted, and there was virtually no storyline to hold my interest. There was a lot of potential in the subject matter, but it would've been better at half the running time, or as a small chunk of a larger topic. The only real highlight of the film was an interesting song by Peter Gabriel that ran over the end credits. The animation itself was artificial, and it seemed that we saw the same sequences played out repeatedly.

This short documentary was a bit of a mixed bag. First the 3-D and CG: the director obviously was more at ease with the the extensive CG then the live action elements, because the 3-D work was jarring and uneven during then. Part of the problem occurs when the live-action segments are shot too closely to the target. There is a sequence in a car and it took me ten seconds at least to get adjusted to the 3-D. These are not problems that occurred in vista shots.

The CG work was fantastic and the 3-D involving it was equally as impressive. I saw Meet the Robinsons in 3-D this spring and am eagerly awaiting whatever other 3-D offers there are in store like Beowolf and Avatar.

I hate to keep ragging on the live-action elements, but the acting was wretched too. Apparently it is difficult finding somebody who will have all of 30 seconds of screen time and maybe 20 words of dialogue to not sound like they're reading off of a teleprompter. It is nice to see and having a 5-year it is nice to be able to show and explain to him how we can and do know these things about creatures that died out millions of years ago, but with such wooden acting it makes me just sit and wait until the CG behemoths come tearing across the screen again.

I am very surprised by the fact that the most accurate paleontology documentary of the 2000s was not among any of the famous dinosaur documentaries, but was actually a documentary about Mesozoic sea reptiles. Now I've seen a lot of negative comments in the reviews, but I must disagree.

First of all, while the actors' segments that play the paleontologists may seem distracting, this is actually an aspect much better than most dinosaur documentaries that just present speculation as facts (Walking with Dinosaurs and even the most recent Prehistoric Planet); now of course, that's not exactly a bad thing (since the non-avian dinosaurs were already gone now so there needs to be certain assumption to fill our gap in understanding), but when making these kinds of documentaries, I believe the producers must make clear how realistic and how much of the material presented in this documentary is real. This documentary finds a perfect solution to that by having actors playing out paleontology segments, which provides context to the speculation of certain scenes and is there to educate the audience about the ecological aspect of each animal (i.e. Xiphactinus eating Gillicus, how much of a generalist feeder a Tylosaurus was, etc.). It just shows how thoroughly researched this documentary is, and you'll be amazed by how accurately the discoveries are represented (once you search about each article regarding the discoveries showcased in this documentary).

And while some even said the music was bad, I believe that's because they've expected a grandiose score that you'd oftenly hear in BBC documentaries. Personally I don't find any problem at all and really the music when the sharks appear and whenever the Tylosaurus is present onscreen is just top notch. Animations and narration? They're pretty decent. If you think the animations are bad, that pretty much applies to every dinosaur documentary before Prehistoric Planet to be honest (yes, even Walking with Dinosaurs is very dated by todays standards). Like literally no people other than the reviewers in IMDb were this critical regarding this movie, which kind of bothers me.

Anyway, I give this movie a 10/10 for the reasons above. If you're a dinosaur/paleontology documentary fan, don't let the negative reviews miss out this masterpiece. It definitely would not disappoint you.

I usually end up defending America most of the time on the Internet when they get slandered unrightfully so, but maybe when it comes to nature documentaries you Yanks should just give up

The depiction of Tylosaurus has not aged well though that's by all means the lesser sin

I get the guy watched Walking with Dinosaurs and wanted to make his own version out of excitement but this was embarrassing, You're supposed to making a version of a nature documentary with dinosaurs, this felt like a rejected spielberg script Bad CGI, but lets say I forgive that, why did they bother hiring these fake reenactments for fidning the fossils maybe spend more money on the Dinosaur CGI, you know, having more than 15 minutes of dinosaur screentime?

Don't say "perhaps they..", you're narrating the story, No grandiose music, fair enough you cannot afford an orchestra but my god the awful music like it's for a budget Avatar movie, the use of the whimsical flute just makes me wince, am I waiting for a coming out story for a fish The editor is awful, just compare the Sea episode scene from Walking with Dinosaurs to this.

What is aboslutely the worst sin of all is that you can tell that they didn't even try, they purposely tried to stretch the footage as much as possible, there's no REAL passion behind it, it's barely moving cgi that's been stretched and reused, either the director didn't care or he hired people that didn't care, but the director has responsibility in the end.

There was no passion for this. No love. It was uninspired and if the director DID really care he would have made sure to not release this incomplete work.

Sea Monsters features a story of a family of Dolichorhynchops ("long-nosed face") - a type of plesiosaurs - living out their lives in the inland sea of what is now North America. The film begins with the Dollie mother giving birth and nurturing her two young in the safer near-coastal shallows, but eventually the trio takes to deeper waters to follow the migrating fish. Wonders and dangers await.

Narrative: very decent. The concept of following one family works well, and ultimately serves to provide food for thought and empathy. What doesn't work well is that the doc flips back to 20th century paleontologists (played by actors, mostly) studying the protagonists' fossil bones every few minutes. This is done so frequently that it's distracting.

Graphics: I'm gonna say "good". The animation of the marine beasts is a little too glossy and artificial-looking, - going for drama rather than realism, - but the lighting is dynamic and captivating, the movements fluid and exciting, and the overall artwork - lush and detailed. So the somewhat unrealistic-looking animals didn't bother me much.

The music is cheap... discount-Disney-style... and usually doesn't fit well.

Overall: the Sea Monsters and Walking with Monsters episodes of BBC's Walking with Dinosaurs series appealed to me more... but if you enjoy this subject, the present doc is 40 minutes fairly well-spent. 6/10.