Mission Blue (Robert Nixon, 2014): USA

Reviewed by Robin Kadir at Santa Barbara International Film Festival 2014

On opening night of the festival they screened Mission Blue, which is a feature documentary about legendary oceanographer, marine biologist, environmentalist and National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence Sylvia Earle, and her campaign to create a global network of protected marine sanctuaries. We get to follow Sylvias life almost from birth, and it is breathtaking to see what this powerful woman have done in her life. In the film we get to see both past and present and she also talks about the future, so all parts are covered and you get a surrounding image of the topic.

It brings another dimension when you see James Cameron, a huge film icon in the film industry, talk about the ocean along with Sylvia Earle. It makes the film more powerful and maybe gets more people to realize the issue when, not only the ones who works with the ocean on a daily basis, is involved in the discussion too.

The best thing with the film were the shots and scenes, beautiful over and under water climate, you could get the sense of how it was in there and you saw clearly all organisms living there. Even though I’m not a huge fan of documentaries, this had a nice build-up with going back and forth from the background story, to the present struggle and the future hopes. Robert Nixon knew what he was doing and people without even knowledge about this before the film, suddenly understood.

It was a good ending where Sylvia Earle got the question about how she manages to keep up to try to save the ocean all these years, about how she never just thinks about giving up and do something else with her life, or just take some time off. She responded with the parallel about seeing a child falling out the window, you don’t take time off from that and do something else, you’re standing there trying to catch them, no matter how long it will take, because you’ll do everything you can to save them, and she feels the same way about the ocean. That really shows her dedication for what she does and how much she’ll believe in it. The only thing that was a shame was that there were no clear message about what you can do to help after the movie. Which in a sort of way is nice because then you’ll know that they’re not doing this film to brainwash or guilt trip anyone and take advantage of that, instead they only want to open peoples eyes and then if they feel passionate about it they can go to the website or get in touch with the people somehow to help out.

It was a really cool film to see and the respect for Sylvia Earle really gained after seeing this.