Karry Best movie of this year hands down!

Borserie it is finally so absorbing because it plays like a lyrical road odyssey that’s also a detective story.

AnhartLinkin This story has more twists and turns than a second-rate soap opera.

Jakoba True to its essence, the characters remain on the same line and manage to entertain the viewer, each highlighting their own distinctive qualities or touches.

dbborroughs Irwin (Poseidon Adventure/Towering Inferno/Lost in Space) Allen's Oscar winning look at the ocean and seas. Actually its bases on a book by Rachel Carson. This is a 62 minute look at various sea life. The film begins with a horrible creation of the world bit that segues into a god awful "This is the sea..." or similar nonsense where we get quick cutting and stentorian speech thats more at home in a exploitation trailer "See man vs shark" that sort of thing over and over again. After about ten minutes of really lousy material the film settles down into footage of sea life. To be certain by todays standards its nothing special when compared to the numerous Discovery Channel specials, but its still impressive.Some of it it is actual sea footage, some is from aquariums and much of the non-nature footage is staged or borrowed. but it doesn't matter since once the film gets up and running it just neat stuff (though I could have lived with out the man vs shark bit). Its a good film and worth a shot. I should mention that the film ends with a warning about global warming, which the film says started just before 1900 and which "very shortly" will cause the seas to rise and will flood us all out. Clearly Al Gore is late on the band wagon yet again.

max von meyerling Before Irwin Allen went on to produce crappy, clumsy, cardboard disaster epics with gaudy but primitive special effects, he managed to get himself noticed by throwing together a film version of Rachel Carson's bestselling (82 weeks on the NYTimes list) The Sea Around Us. I say put together because this film, which impressed everybody (1953 Academy Award) in the early fifties by merely having undersea color photography, because the footage was supplied by people and organizations with an interest in self promotion like oil companies, commercial fishing companies, shipping companies and the Australian National Tourist Board. What Allen did was to get his hands on free or almost free footage and write a voice- over narrative to go along with the footage and slap the already well-known title on it. Irwin Allen was the type of hideous cheese ball producer who thinks: Why pay a writer to write a script? After all there's nothing to it… and comes up with what sounds important but is just a lot of meaningless but portentous sh*t. He failed as a journalist and was reduced to working for an ad agency, so once a hack, always a hack. He was an even worse writer than Joe Gillis. To him his script must have sounded just as good as Rachel Carson or maybe even Bill Faulkner but to anyone learning creative writing it's a prime example of what not to do.While Technicolor processed the film it doesn't seem to have been shot using the Technicolor process because the three strip cameras would have been too bulky to use underwater. Instead it seems as though various types of mono pack film stocks were used. Ask yourself why there is no cinematographer credited? It's all advertising/propaganda film. The print shown on TCM looks terrible and it must have been something of an orphan film to go unrestored. Perhaps the people who pay for such things are put off by the ham fisted hack narration, the obvious business connections (RKO at the time was still owned by Howard Hughes who was involved in undersea exploration and even underwater feature movies; UNDERWATER! 1955, at the time) or the fact that Carson, who went on the write the environmentalist clarion call, The Silent Spring, had her work treated in such a shabby manner. Like all of Allen's work, its best appreciated by adolescent boys. And not too bright ones at that.

dedletteroffice This work conveys an appreciation of not only sea life but the oceans as an avenue of commerce, subject of artisans and realm of warfare. At a surface level it seems to run counter to the reputation of Rachel Carson as conservationist. It depicts, without judgment, not only the capture but the killing of large fish. At least one such scene was gratuitous. But as that was the attitude of the day (1953), it realistically depicted the attitude, if unwittingly. Still, because of the camera work, the detail and the both Atlantic and Pacific settings the viewer is left with a large chunk of the appreciation of that 70% of the Earth it's obvious Carson and screenwriter Irwin Allen (Flipper, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea) posses.

Robert Reynolds This won an Academy Award for Documeentary Feature and most definitely deserved to win. The whole project is well-executed and the underwater camerawork is particularly worthy of mention. Holds up very well after almost fifty years. Turner Classic Movies usually shows this a few times a year. Highly recommended.