What a strange documentary.
On the good side it presents quite well the problem and its causes. Industrialization brought a rise in global temperature. Temperature rising leads to warmer seas and coral reefs deaths. It's informative and didactic. I did learn many things about corals. Images are amazing and truly impressive. Specially the before/after scenes.
The problem lies in the conclusion at the end. It takes literally the last 2 minutes of the movie and actually shocked me. It goes like this: "Yes, all the corals are dying, but there's no need to worry! The world is going through changes. There's an environmentalist movement that's *inevitable* and that will fix everything! Look, these forty or so countries have committed to be powered by clean energy. And so did these fifty or so US cities. We just need to show this material to children and they'll save us all in the future!"
There's zero call to action. Zip. Nada. Basically we should just keep enjoying our awesome industrialized lives, lie back and wait for the "inevitable" solution. I've never seen so much naivete in an environmentalist documentary. It's Pollyanna at childish levels.
The movie also spends way too much time documenting it's own production, telling how hard it was to take those shots, to reach the places, to place and operate the cameras. It's in great part a documentary about it's own making.
On the good side it presents quite well the problem and its causes. Industrialization brought a rise in global temperature. Temperature rising leads to warmer seas and coral reefs deaths. It's informative and didactic. I did learn many things about corals. Images are amazing and truly impressive. Specially the before/after scenes.
The problem lies in the conclusion at the end. It takes literally the last 2 minutes of the movie and actually shocked me. It goes like this: "Yes, all the corals are dying, but there's no need to worry! The world is going through changes. There's an environmentalist movement that's *inevitable* and that will fix everything! Look, these forty or so countries have committed to be powered by clean energy. And so did these fifty or so US cities. We just need to show this material to children and they'll save us all in the future!"
There's zero call to action. Zip. Nada. Basically we should just keep enjoying our awesome industrialized lives, lie back and wait for the "inevitable" solution. I've never seen so much naivete in an environmentalist documentary. It's Pollyanna at childish levels.
The movie also spends way too much time documenting it's own production, telling how hard it was to take those shots, to reach the places, to place and operate the cameras. It's in great part a documentary about it's own making.