Mission Blue (Fisher Stevens and Robert Nixon, 2014): USA

Reviewed by Jacob Wirsenius, viewed at Santa Barbara international film festival at the Arlington Theater.

Mission blue was the movie shown at the opening night and is a documentary about how people are destroying the ocean and how that might effect the people on the earth. I would recommend this documentary even though I felt it wasn’t interesting enough. Im recommending it because it gave you and insight to the ocean, how it works and how people really are destroying it, the more people who see it the better is the chance of saving it. It’s directed by Fisher Stevens and Robert Nixon and it’s starring Sylvia Earle, James Cameron and Michael deGruy.

Even though it’s a documentary about the ocean it’s also a film about Sylvia Earle, the main character that has dedicated her life to the ocean and does everything she can to explore and learn more about it. I found this documentary very partial because they have this clear mission and message they want to send to the audience so it almost become inevitable to not make it partial. Even though it may serve it’s purpose it turns out to be less interesting and you wont get any surprises. During the whole movie they talk about how the ocean is important for the people to keep living on this earth. They also show a lot of footage underwater which I really appreciated because then at least it could give me visual experience. I felt that it never really caught me emotionally, they didn’t give enough strong facts for the audience to hold on to and talk about. When you make a documentary like this it’s important to really move people and make the film powerful otherwise people wont remember it and just move on. The strongest scene that I kept in my mind was the shark-scene where the fishermen only cut the fin from the shark and then just kick them back in the water.

It is similar to most nature documentaries in the sense of editing, music and really cool footage. One issue though is that when you left the theater you didn’t really know what to do about the problem with the ocean. They didn’t give any advice or solution to this problem so there is still a lot of questions after seeing it. I think the focused to much on Sylvia Earle instead of focusing on the subject. You jump from facts about the problems with overfishing, the ocean and oil spills to a sequence of Sylvia only talking about her life. In my opinion they should have just focused on one subject and make the documentary shorter.

As a documentary fan I wouldn’t not see this again but I would still recommend it as I said just because the fact this it is an important subject and I believe it’s important to know about stuff like this, by just seeing it you might talk about it with others and that will help in a small scale. And also if you like cool underwater footage you can watch it for that reason, also James Cameron is in the film.