MOVIE REVIEW : ‘Great Barrier Reef’ Hypnotic in IMAX at Science Museum

Few documentaries are more visually hypnotic than the ones shot underwater. Blue, rapt and mysterious, they show us a world dreamlike but also vicious: full of predators and victims, with life a constant struggle to eat or avoid being eaten. And the refracted sunlight casts a soft, pearly radiance on it all.

“The Great Barrier Reef” (at the Museum of Science and Industry’s IMAX Theater), isn’t a great underwater documentary, like Jacques Cousteau and Louis Malle’s early films. Nor is it entertaining and whimsical, like that ‘50s Disney short “Mysteries of the Deep,” a childhood favorite of mine. But it does have the advantage of being shot in IMAX, with its huge 70-by-54-foot screen image and incredibly gorgeous, hyper-real detail.

“Barrier Reef” is set on a coral reef--the world’s largest, off the Australian coast--and it’s safe to say that no underwater film, not even Cousteau’s, has brought that world to us with such sharp vision and overwhelming impact. Watching this film, with its plethora of marine life, its manta rays--Spanish dancers sinuously whipping their skirts--its ballooned-out puffer fish, moray eels, sharks and huge schools of cardinal fish, has a tonic quality. It gentles the audience out, even as the narration, mostly by “CBS Morning News” ex-anchor Bill Kurtis, rings on portentously and heavily.

Kurtis, who also had a hand in writing the script, is always straining for cosmic significance, the march of time. Like John Huston’s Noah Cross in “Chinatown,” he wants us to know that all life came from the water: slews, tide pools or, in this case, coral reefs. Ironically, what the camera shows is often so impressive that this magniloquent framework is unnecessary.

The Great Barrier Reef, as Kurtis remarks, is the oldest living, or partially living, organism on Earth, constantly renewing itself as new sea polyps grow, die and leave their calcified skeletons in the fantastic, fairy-tale spires and towers. And the life forms that zip or glide through its aqueous avenues are wonderful camera subjects, including the sharks, so perfectly adapted to a cruel world that they’ve survived, little changed, for hundreds of millions of years. Up above, we see the green turtles on land spilling out hundreds of slippery white eggs--certainly a unique movie moment--and the later frantic race of the newly hatched hordes across the perilous beach to the sea. We see lobsters scuttling, anemones fluttering, puffer fish balloning themselves out to foil assailants. We even, disturbingly, watch those strangest denizens of the deep: underwater camera people at work.

All that’s enough for a fascinating movie--especially one shot in IMAX. Produced, directed and co-written by George Casey, “The Great Barrier Reef” (rated PG) isn’t one of IMAX’s strongest entries. It’s dwarfed in impact by “Chronos,” “Grand Canyon” “To the Limit,” and several others. But, still, it’s absorbing, stimulating, full of fresh, clear-eyed images. It’s nice to see a movie where the sharks are on camera, instead of arranging the deal.

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