Early in this engaging portrait of sea-life, the veteran broadcaster David Attenborough outlines his thesis: “After living for nearly 100 years on this planet, I now understand that the most important place on Earth is not on land but at sea.”
Age has done little to quell the naturalist’s intellectual curiosity and childlike wonder for what he terms the “greatest age of ocean discovery”. Ardent lovers may well wish for someone to look at them the way Attenborough looks at giant kelp; at another moment, he recalls being so excited on his first snorkel that he forgot to breathe.
The usual oceanic documentary subjects – whales, dolphins and sharks – take second billing to underwater flora. Well, what look like flora. As Attenborough reminds us, the often flowery formations that make up coral reefs are, in fact, fauna.
The cinematographer Santiago Cabral, whose previous credits include Lions of the Sea and Blue Whales: Return of the Giants, glides through sea meadows, underwater mountains and kelp forests. These aren’t just ecosystems; they are communities under threat. A Liberian fisherman named John Adams, one of several global witnesses, recalls a time when his nets were teaming with fish; industrial poachers ensure that only minnows and discarded plastic remain.
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In one catastrophic sequence, scallop dredgers plough the sea floor, turning a thriving habitat into a wasteland. Everything they sift, save for a few clams, they discard.
Attenborough outlines other crazed practices: “Lines of baited hooks 50 miles long reel in millions of sharks every year. We have now killed two-thirds of all large predatory fish.”
The presenter counterpoints these grim statistics with good-news stories from the no-take zones of the Scottish Isle of Arran and Hawaii’s Papahanaumokuakea Marine National Monument, where protected areas have replenished dying species.
Ocean with David Attenborough is being released around the world on his 99th birthday. Next month, nations will converge at the UN Ocean Conference, in France, where they will have a chance to create marine reserves in 30 per cent of their waters.
The film closes with its presenter’s call to support fishing communities by outlawing catastrophic industrial plunder: “The ocean can recover faster than we can ever imagine. It can bounce back to life.”
In cinemas from Thursday, May 8th
