(courtesy Oceanfilm.net)
To be honest, this reviewer put off watching Ocean With David Attenborough for quite a few months because life was, and is, super stressful and who needs to find out more about how supremely comprehensively humanity is trashing our oceans on top of the litany of other environmental sins that seem to build day by day?
But there’s one thing I forgot about anything created by the legendary naturalist, and it’s odd since I have devoured all of the programs he’s produced for a good few decades now, and it’s that he always chooses to find hope even the most dire of situations.
And not false hope either; the kind that rounds off the 1.5 hour running time of Ocean With David Attenborough is based on real world evidence, the irrefutable kind that takes the idea that we can recover from trashing the worlds seas and oceans and that the oceanic environment, one which Attenborough is essential for all life on earth including everything on land, and adds real weight and substance to it.
But before we get to the damage being done and the fixes that can be made, this superlatively well made documentary film takes us on a trademark Attenborough tour of wonderment of the natural world, this time in the coastal waters and the deep oceans which, it is pointed out, we have seen less of than the planets of our solar system.
It’s one of the things to love about any Attenborough documentary – you can count on the fact that Attenborough will deservedly wax lyrical about how immensely beautiful, rich and diverse the natural world is, and how infinitely precious it is too.
He does this in Ocean With David Attenborough by taking us on a cinematically luxurious tour of the deep oceans where research is showing life is abundantly rich and that the idea that the deep ocean is a desert devoid of light and life is simply not true.
As point of proof that there is verdant life where it was once assumed there was none, Attenborough takes us to the sea mounts which rise from the ocean floor anywhere up to three kilometres, and around which is a profusion of life from the smallest fish and invertebrate to the great predators of the ocean.
It’s an astonishing sight seeing sharks shimmy up the side of a huge underwater mountain or to witness the colour and spectacle when we are taken to the coastal waters alongside which many of us live and in which deep upwellings of plankton-rich water up and over the continental shelf, feeding the many fish species upon which some three billion people directly depend for their primary source of food.
We bear witness to coral reefs and technicolour fish in endless variety and giant kelp forests where predatory sea urchins are held in check and in perfect balance by fish and crabs that eat them and ensure that no one species tips into dominance over the other.
But this natural world, so perfectly ordered and balanced, is under sustained threat by a rapacious human onslaught which cares only for plundering what it can from the ocean’s bounty with no thought for what comes next.
Horrifyingly, and after the wonder of the first third or so of Ocean With David Attenborough it is jarring to an almost soul-shaking degree, some 400,000 massive factory trawlers are taking unsustainable amounts of fish from the oceans, overfishing krill in the Antarctic or using sea floor trawling methods which excoriate abundant ecosystems, many millennia old and which reduce them to empty environments which look like they have undergone nuclear devastation.
It’s distressing to witness and while it’s a necessary and important watch, you spend much of the second act of Ocean With David Attenborough feeling, and quite rightly given the weight of the damning evidence against us, that we are once again the unthinking architects of our own demise.
In fact, so alarming are the interviews with fisherman in the Aran Islands of the UK, where scallop fishing has gone wastefully industrial – some three quarters of the catch is simply scooped back over the side of the ships into environments now devoid of life of any kind – or with traditional coastal villagers of Liberia, who need the oceans to feed their families, that you come close to giving up any and all hope for the future of our unique and precious oceanic environments.
But then Attenborough does what he does so well, and brings hope, which you thought could no longer possibly be in the mix, back into the picture and Ocean With David Attenborough, directed by Toby Nowlan, Keith Scholey and Colin Butfield and marking the famed naturalist’s first-ever collaboration with the National Geographic Society, suddenly talks of what we can do to arrest the catastrophic decline of the oceans.
Pointing out that less than 3% of the world’s oceans are fully protected from fishing and trawler dredging and the like, Attenborough takes us an illuminating journey from the Channel Islands in the United States to a site in the Mediterranean Ocean off France where just a protected single percent of the expanse is bringing life back where there none to the Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument off Hawaii which is transforming not only the protected areas but the ocean around it too.
These examples are not just empty hope – they prove, points out Attenborough with the hopeful authority only he can manage, that while we are capable of great damage to the world’s oceans, they are, with our will and action, more than able to bounce back, not just a little bit but in ways that astonish and delight.
Taking you on a journey full of wonderment then despair then rock-solid hope, Ocean With David Attenborough is a brilliantly presented documentary, brimming with a trademark love for the natural world, cinematography so beautiful it catches your breath repeatedly and a message of emboldening hope that we can not only arrest the destruction of our oceans but take them to verdant abundance again, and in so doing, save the world as a whole.
Ocean With David Attenborough streams on Disney+