Aliens of the Deep movie review (2005)

For Cameron, the film continues an obsession. When he wrote and directed "The Abyss" in 1989, his story involved scientists venturing into the deepest parts of the ocean. The movie was a box office disappointment, not least because the director's cut reveals that the studio chopped crucial and amazing footage -- and also, reportedly, because many potential ticket-buyers did not know what an "abyss" is. For Cameron, it was an epiphany.

He returned to the sea bed for "Titanic" (1997), still the highest-grossing movie of all time, and essentially never came up for air. In 2002 his "Expedition: Bismarck," made for the Discovery Channel, used deep-water submersibles to visit the grave of the doomed battleship, and in 2003 he made the 3-D IMAX movie "Ghosts of the Abyss," which visited the wreck of the Titanic itself.

That was a movie with fascinating content, but I found the 3-D format unsatisfactory, and thought it might have been better to forget the gimmick and just give us the images. Now comes Cameron's "Aliens of the Deep," also in IMAX 3-D, also fascinating, and with much improved 3-D. After tinkering with the format for years, the IMAX technicians have devised oversized glasses that fit easily over existing eyeglasses and cover the entire field of vision. I saw the first 3-D movie, "Bwana Devil," in 1952, and have been tired of the format ever since, but IMAX finally seems to be getting it right.

The movie is about expeditions to the deepest seas on Earth, where life is found to flourish under incredible conditions. We've read reports of some of these discoveries before -- the worms that live around the sulphurous vents of hot water on the cold sea bottom, for example -- but now we see them, photographed in lonely and splendid isolation, and the sights are magnificent.

What are these creatures? A good question, and one you might well still be asking after the movie, since it is high on amazement but low on information. His aquanauts, all real scientists or students, keep saying their discoveries are magnificent, beautiful, unbelievable, incredible, etc., and so they are, but only rudimentary facts are supplied about these life forms.