Under the Sea
Don't bother to tell your companions, especially if they're children, that Under the Sea 3-D is a documentary. (Perhaps go with "that new Jim Carrey movie," since he narrates.) Just take them along to the nearest Imax. Because once they're settled in and have put on the WALL-E glasses, the film has enough charms to completely seduce them. These include 6-ft. garden eels who plant themselves en masse in the sea bottom like a field of slithery reeds, the leafy sea dragon, an animal so peculiar-looking E.T. would feel bad for it, and several sequences of steamy cuttlefish mating. (A child in the screening I attended asked if "that's why they were called cuddle-fish?")
Being underwater is a pretty surreal experience anyway, so the quirks of 3-D seem more forgivable, even fun and whimsical, in this environment. Footage of sharks encountering giant sting rays and turtles casually munching on deadly poisonous jellyfish are viewed through a mask, in the dark; scuba divers see the ocean the same way. 3-D filmmakers have found that objects moving quickly across the screen can make viewers nauseous, but having anything move quickly into your field of vision in the water is startling. Mostly the technology succeeds, however, not because it makes you feel you're underwater so much as that you're no longer on solid ground. At several points, you almost want to hold your breath. (See photos of life beneath Antarctic ice.)
This is the third aquatic documentary Howard Hall has directed for Imax, after Deep Sea 3-D and Into the Deep 3-D. Shot mostly in coral reefs around Indonesia and Australia, this one required lugging enormous equipment (total weight: 8,000 lb.) about in boats and logging vast numbers of hours under the sea for a mere 40 minutes of screen time. But the brevity of the film, and the spectacular oddness of the creatures, leave you — and, perhaps more crucially, your children — wanting more. Awww moments, the tentpoles of so many nature documentaries, are mostly reserved for the sea lions, who apparently enjoy looking at themselves in the camera's reflective lens. Carrey is by turns serious and goofy, which mostly works. At one point, a crab nonchalantly carries away a jellyfish on its back. The jokes write themselves.
Documentaries for families always have to do an awkward two-step between being entertaining and informative. Under the Sea 3-D splashes down clearly on the entertaining side, and environmentalists might take exception to the Ripley's Believe It or Not! approach it takes to its subject. There's a dutiful hat-tip to the threat coral reefs face from global warming, without any substantive advice on what a concerned moviegoer could do about it. Nevertheless, it's quite a parental high to see wonder on the face of a child. Even behind the weirdo glasses.