Dreadfully Boring

Am I Missing Something?

It's a mild crowd pleaser for people who are exhausted by blockbusters.

There are moments that feel comical, some horrific, and some downright inspiring but the tonal shifts hardly matter as the end results come to a film that's perfect for this time.

I imagine this lost a lot going from the visual power of 3D IMAX to my 60 inch 2D monitor, And it's 40 minute running time limited how deep it could go. (No pun intended). But it still was enjoyable – a well done wildlife documentary, focusing on the wild feeding frenzy that occurs most years along the eastern coast of South Africa, as giant clouds of hundreds of millions of sardines gather in search of food, bringing in turn every kind of imaginable predator in turn to eat them: sharks, dolphins, whales, sea birds, seals, and – of course – man. Humans have fished this phenomena so heavily that the numbers of sardines has started to drop in recent years, and at the same time global ocean warming has started to change the sardines' geographical migration patterns. All this is interesting and (or course) very well photographed. But probably because IMAX has to appeal to young kids as well as adults there's not the kind of depth of specific scientific information you might find in one of those BBC/David Attenborough documentaries covering the same subject. Worth seeing, but probably far more so in it's natural habitat of a 60 foot IMAX screen.

If you are a sardine, this must be a pretty interesting movie. No so for a jaded human such as myself. The film has some well shot scenes of the battle between sardines and its predators, comparable to some really battle scenes in intensity. But when you think about it, it's just some birds and dolphins attacking and eating sardines. Do you care?The scenes by themselves would get a 8/10 for visuals and 2/10 for meaning (because it's sardines). The accompanying episodes of some black fisherman doing random stuff, apparently fishing for the sardines too are pointless and boring. The narration about cold and warm current is totally boring. The argument that we must protect the oceans and probably fish less is common sense, but it isn't presented here with any particular persuasiveness."This is the wild ocean, this is where Africa meets the sea." sounds great for the tag-line, but in reality there is nothing particularly wild or interesting about the coast (coast is where land meets the sea).So I suggest skipping this.

I don't normally go out of my way to write up reviews on this site - but wow, even my kids were bored! This movie could have easily been called "40 Minutes of Small Fish Getting Eaten Over and Over again!" Admittedly I did not look to hard at the show description - but with a name like "Wild Ocean" you expect to get some amazing underwater photography. You got none of that from this film. All it was was pictures of a school of sardines getting eaten by birds and dolphins (and a few sharks). That in and of itself isn't very exciting and to have to sit through 40 minutes of it (seriously the shots DON'T change) is pure torture. The best they manage to do is change the shots to slow motion near the end of the film. It really is lame for an IMAX film.

This film is a poorly edited, disjointed mishmash of repetitive incomplete ideas involving sea life off the eastern South African coast. The film contains beautiful scene and action shots of a limited nature... something like five or six basic locations whose film is interspersed to suggest a semi-plot involving the seasonal sardine run. There's a mere suggestion about environmental issues but that's not linked in any distinct way to the actions at hand. I liken this film to a music video that should have been limited to 6 minutes max rather than the 40 alloted...it dragged on and on in repetitive waves washing on my visual shores. The drum beat / rhythmic music's interesting, but doesn't evoke an appropriate emotional response of the web of life (though in parts it did sound like a rip-off of the Lion King). Probably the most boring it-felt-like-4-hours of my life.