Aliens of the Deep

There’s hardly much mystery as to why James Cameron hasn’t made a new feature since 1997’s ‘Titanic’. Since he’s obviously been having so much fun with undersea exploration, why bother with the stresses of making another proper movie? This 48-minute IMAX 3-D documentary provides a stop-gap of sorts, following the techie-obsessed filmmaker and a crew of scientists to the depths of the ocean floor, where steam escaping from cracks in the Earth’s crust has fostered a remarkably vibrant eco-system untouched by sunlight.

That IMAX 3-D cameras have plunged so deep to record an often bizarre array of sea creatures undoubtedly delivers a certain ‘wow’ factor, but the accompanying commentary is heavier on breathless excitement than solid fact, and we don’t learn as much as we should. Instead, echoing Cameron’s previous ‘The Abyss’, the film draws parallels between the survival of life in this testing environment with the possibility of bio-diversity on other worlds, in particular the frozen seas of Jupiter’s moon Europa. A final flourish of CGI speculation however, only goes to show that our natural world still has the ante on wonder.