Ocean is David Attenborough’s Most Important Parting Gift
The climate crisis seems overwhelmingly dire. David Attenborough’s new film reshapes our perspective to offer genuine hope.
good.film
a month ago
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Is there any voice more reassuring than the honeyed tones of International Living TreasureTM Sir David Attenborough? He’s got to be – and we mean this with the utmost respect – the ultimate “warm comfy slippers” of broadcasting (maybe even a warm Milo too). At 99 years of age, that classic narration is sounding slightly weaker, but the insights are stronger than ever.
Ocean with David Attenborough is the titular biologist’s latest foray into the natural world, and if there’s ever been a film that qualifies as “impact entertainment”, it’s this one. Attenborough and his team clearly have a burning megaphone they’re hollering through with Ocean, and audiences are hearing them loud and clear. In fact it’s a documentary so arresting that Ocean warranted a wide theatrical release here in Australia (most of the footage was shot in astounding 8K resolution).
But pretty visuals aren’t the only reason to see this film on the big screen. This film is a clarion call, from a man who knows what he’s talking about – and he openly admits he is running out of time to share it. We’re only just starting to understand the ocean, he admits, and what we've found could change the course of our future.
What’s Ocean with David Attenborough About? Through spectacular sequences featuring coral reefs, kelp forests and the open ocean, Attenborough shares why a healthy ocean keeps the entire planet flourishing – and exposes the realities and challenges facing our ocean.
Who Directed Ocean with David Attenborough? Colin Butfield, Toby Nowlan, Keith Scholey
Who Stars in Ocean with David Attenborough? Guess who!
Where Can I See Ocean with David Attenborough? Ocean with David Attenborough is out now in Australian cinemas. Get discount movie tickets to see it for less at Dendy, Event, Village and Hoyts Cinemas right here. We donate $1 from every Good Tix sold to Australian charities.
It’s urgency that marks out Ocean with David Attenborough as a different experience to any old nature doco. Yes, there are statistics galore (did you know that we’re STILL discovering 2,000 new marine species every year?). But although it goes unsaid, Attenborough seems to have sat down and thought, We’ve all seen enough lions stalking gazelle – How can I truly make a difference with this one? The result is genuinely startling. Ocean is a film that puts the health of our oceans into perspective AND back in the public conversation. And for once, it’s a climate crisis doco that offers genuine hope for our planet.
How is Ocean with David Attenborough different from other nature docos?
It’s easy to forget just how LONG David Attenborough has been doing this. We already know he’s an absurdly experienced authority; the quick snippets of footage of him, tanned and lanky, on a sea expedition in 1957 (yes, almost SEVENTY years ago) just back it up. It’s a clever move to tie Attenborough’s own lifetime into the timeline of our own, worldwide, awakening and understanding of our immense oceans. It’s a subtle way of saying "Believe me, I’ve seen these changes with my own eyes.”
The occasional personal anecdote – like the first time he ever scuba dived – add a personal touchpoint to Ocean, and so do the interludes from some well-chosen (but unnamed) people who have various connections to an ocean environment. There’s the Maine lobster hauler. The African fisherman. The Hawaiian environmentalist. They all have a story to tell, and they all humanise what could’ve been an overwhelming story without any grounding to our own lives.
The film is super positive, at first – the modus operandi being that showing us the seven seas’ most jaw-dropping wonders should be enough to kick in our protective instincts, rather than scolding us. The ocean, we’re told, is more connected than we’d ever imagined. Cue short segments on the mind-boggling diversity of coral reefs, giant sea kelp forests that rival any jungles on land, and stunning schools of tuna, whirling like tornadoes. As Attenborough whispers, it’s a world in delicate balance, full of marvels we’ve barely glimpsed before. It’s pretty, and stirring – and naturally, you just know there’s a BUT coming.
How does Ocean with David Attenborough lay bare the damage we’re doing to our seas?
Here’s where the horror story kicks in. Over the course of two years, the filmmakers captured unprecedented, high-definition footage revealing the real-world devastation of industrial fishing methods. In one scene, Attenborough explains how bottom trawling, which involves a heavy chain & net being dragged along the ocean floor, is like ploughing the seabed over and over. Before our eyes, the abundant and gorgeous “forests” we gazed at earlier are bulldozed into a grey, ashy graveyard. Bustling communities of sea life, destroyed in an instant. It’s traumatic (watching this scene with my Spongebob-loving eight year old son, he said sadly, “Bye Squidward.”). One diver describes it as like the garden of Eden after a nuclear winter.
The before-and-after contrast of this action is powerful. At first, you’re angry on behalf of the scallops and urchins who’ve had their entire world crushed into soot. Then, when David shares that three-quarters of the catch is then THROWN AWAY, you’re infuriated at the waste. And finally, when you learn that the churning of the sediment unleashes vast amounts of carbon dioxide – which in turn, contributes to the warming of the planet – you’ll be enraged at the global ramifications. This (completely legal, by the way) destruction might be happening on the ocean floor, but it’s directly affecting all of us, on our planet, and the air we all breathe.
There’s more scenes of huge trawlers (there are 400,000 of them roaming the oceans at any one time) that powerfully demonstrate how the industrial fishing industry is shocking in its scale – sucking hundreds of thousands of tons of krill into vast nets, destined for our health supplements and pet food (never mind the whales and penguins that feed on them). For the African coastal fishermen, their catch is down to tiny minnows and nets full of plastic, while trawlers from – surprise, surprise – wealthy nations haul away the very food source they’ve relied on for generations. As Attenborough describes it, This is modern colonialism. It’s a take that makes you gasp at its bullseye accuracy.
Seeing all of this up close is disturbing and enraging; the kind of “wrong” you can just feel in your gut. Attenborough himself sounds as angry as we've ever heard him when he bellows, "Some claim this is sustainable. We have drained the life from our ocean. Now we are almost out of time.” But DON’T walk out here. Ocean has a wonderful knack of keeping that flicker of hope alive. With his great-grandfatherly tones, Attenborough blows gently on the flame: “The ocean can recover faster than anything we've ever seen. And it's already happening."
How does Ocean with David Attenborough offer us hope?
Yep, the great ace up Ocean’s sleeve is that the solution to (almost) all of this heartbreak and marine chaos is simple, effective, and cheap: do nothing. Through some ingenious graphics and a few effective examples, Ocean explains that protected areas like “no take zones” and other reserves have worked wonders in restoring not only the areas themselves, but the SURROUNDING sea life too. In other words, the good effects spread beyond the boundaries. If we just let nature take its course, Attenborough narrates, THE SEA WILL SAVE ITSELF.
That’s an awfully hard to ignore solution, and it’s backed up by the Maine lobster fisherman, who’s seen his depleted stocks grow back to abundance thanks to a local reserve. The largest protected zone on the planet, alongside Hawaii, has seen local tuna populations increase by 54%. And even bleached coral reefs have sprung back to life, when the grazing fish that clean the algae from their surface are left alone to thrive, instead of being overfished into extinction. We’re shown the evidence, too, with a montage of colourful footage, labeled with exotic locations from all over the tropical world.
Ocean takes a beat to point out that, contrary to what you might think, this stance is NOT staunchly “anti-fishing”. As one environmentalist sums up, the goals of conservation and the fishing industry are actually the same: MORE FISH. More abundance, and a healthy ocean, is good news for the fisherman AND the marine life (which we greedy-gutses are urged to think about as more than simply “sea food”).
For those who still have their doubts, Attenborough points to the rise and fall of industrial whaling, which at one stage left only 1% of the planet’s population of blue whales alive. But after lawmakers banned the act, What followed was beyond our wildest dreams, David shares. The number of humpback whales tripled in just 10 years. THIS is the power of protection. The footage that goes alongside his narration makes you believe it – hundreds of spouts and sprays jetting from the ocean as a huge whale pod drifts in tandem. HOORAY!
Even for the real grinches among us who don’t care for whales, Ocean makes it obvious that this push is about more than animal conservation. We find out that the oceans’ stocks of plankton produce more oxygen than all the trees on earth combined, and the giant forests of sea kelp absorb far more carbon than our forests. Doesn’t that make our OCEANS the "lungs of the earth", then? Recent research has proven that these precious areas are the real key to shoring up the health of our planet, and avoiding a cataclysmic climate tipping point.
What’s the takeaway from Ocean with David Attenborough?
The filmmakers of Ocean have a clear mission – make noise, get people talking, and put pressure on governments – so it was a no-brainer for us to cover this one at good.film! And while he might be in his centennial year, Sir David Attenborough is pumped too. After a lifetime of filming our natural world, he tells us, I can't remember a more exciting opportunity for our species. He’s a man on a mission: seemingly recognising that he’s got the world’s ear, Ocean could be his finest and most persuasive collection of images yet.
Across the course of Ocean’s 83 minutes, Attenborough mentions at least three times how we've never been able to really see or properly research many of these underwater understandings until NOW. He urges us (well, our lawmakers really) to up the current 3% of ocean protected areas to “at least” 33%. We need to start seeing the (kelp) forests from the trees! After all, he points out, if we can do it on land, surely we can do it in the sea?
Attenborough might be able to rest easy. Just last week, the UN Ocean Conference marked a pivotal moment for global ocean protection, securing unprecedented support (and billions of dollars) from more than 170 countries, promising urgent action to protect the world’s oceans. It’s not a stretch to suggest that this utterly arresting film, which could be the swansong of one of the planet’s best-known guardians, may have played a part.
What struck us most in Ocean with David Attenborough was its rich vein of hope. It’s not something we expected; when you’re tackling the might of global industrialisation, even a beloved nonagenarian has his limits. But Ocean states a case that seems not only irrefutable, but actually achievable. As the film ends on a silky drone shot of Attenborough atop the white cliffs of Dover, his longing stare out into the vast blue horizon feels like a passing of the baton – from him to us. It's my hope that we come to see the ocean as the lifeblood of our home, he concludes. I'm sure that nothing is more important. If we save the sea, we save our world.
Ocean with David Attenborough is out now in Australian cinemas. Get discount movie tickets to see it for less at Dendy, Event, Village and Hoyts Cinemas right here. We donate $1 from every Good Tix sold to Australian charities.
