"Océans" is a movie worthy of respect, which is another painstaking work of French documentary director jacques perrin after the world-famous "Microcosmos" and "Le peuple migrateur".
The whole movie has an investment of 75 million US dollars, and it took four and a half years to shoot, using the world's most professional underwater shooting team, and finally presenting the gorgeous underwater world on the big screen. This movie is almost impeccable in audio and video, and every movie is flaunting the high price behind its magnificence. It is a blessing to see such a pure and beautiful movie in Chinese cinemas.
However, the sincerity of production may not be directly proportional to the final effect, because the exertion of the level here is an unpredictable variable. As a documentary movie, "Océans" is unqualified, and there is a big gap between it and jacques perrin's first two works. The structure is disorganized, the narration is weak, and the context is unclear, which seems to be the result of disordered arrangement of manuscripts scattered by the wind after being collected. Although a very grand environmental protection theme is deducted, the process of strengthening and deepening the theme is not seen in the process of advancing the story.
Most of the time, it is just a simple listing and display of underwater wonders. The function of the environmental protection theme is only to connect the shooting materials in series, and the connection and transition of this series are very stiff. This is obviously insufficient for a 100-minute movie, and such a theme can be obtained by reading National Geographic magazine.
The most serious problem in "Océans" is that I can't feel the creator's love for the subject, but I'm just selling animal images. Because there are no subtitles to describe the animal names when animals appear, it's difficult for the audience to have a sense of belonging to animals, but only leave a general impression that Océans is beautiful.
These animals are actually the stars of this movie, which should be respected enough. The audience should be able to keep several amazing animals in their memories for a long time by their names, and let them become the media for us to feel and recall the wonders of nature. This sense of belonging is actually very important. In fact, in the American and Japanese versions of the movie, there are explanatory words when animals appear. Unfortunately, these basic information are ignored in the Chinese version.
"Océans" was released in the mainland on August 12th, and only won 2 million box office in the first week. however, the high attendance rate and good reputation made the box office of the movie rise against the trend in the second week, reaching 6.2 million. the documentary that entered the commercial cinema before was "the legend of the sea" by Jia Zhangke last year, which ended in a box office fiasco.
The commercial success of Océans has more significance than the movie itself, so that more foreign high-quality documentaries may be introduced, thus cultivating a fixed documentary audience in the first-tier cities, which will become a good opportunity for domestic documentaries to be commercialized.