Jean-Michel Cousteau’s Secret Ocean 3D

Jean-Michel Cousteau begins this dazzling underwater documentary with archival footage of his father’s pioneering work in showing us life in the other two-thirds of the planet. And then he uses the latest technology to bring those flickering monotone images up to date with spectacular visions of exquisite sea animals shaped like plants, a 30-pound snail that eats food to make it taste bad to predators, a creature that looks like a pile of twigs and has no head and no blood but can regenerate its appendages, a candy-cane striped shrimp, all in a world exotic, strange, and wondrously interdependent with our own. Plankton, we learn from narrator Dr. Sylvia Earle, is not just the source of food for many of the creatures who live in the sea (and who themselves are food for other animals), but the source of much of the oxygen we breathe. The environmental message is subtle, but powerful. These creatures cannot survive without us and we cannot survive without them.

The images are stunning beyond words, but it would have been nice to get more information about the locations and habits of the animals we are observing. Still, this is as spectacular a series of images and as provocative a series of characters as you will see on any screen this year.

Scheduled venues for Jean-Michel Cousteau’s Secret Ocean 3D:

01 – DIGITAL3D – February 20, 2015 – Oregon Museum of Science & Industry, Portland (OR)
02 – IMAX3D – February 27, 2015 – The Henry Ford Museum IMAX Theatre, Dearborn (MI)
03 – DIGITAL3D – March 6, 2015 – Moody Gardens 3D Theater, Galveston (TX)
04 – IMAX3D – March 20, 2015 – Indiana State Museum IMAX 3D Theatre, Indianapolis (IN)
05 – IMAX3D – March 20, 2015 – Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History Samuel C. Johnson IMAX, Washington (DC)
06 – IMAX3D – April 3, 2015 – Montreal Science Center Telus IMAX 3D Theater, Montreal (QC)
07 – IMAX3D – April 16, 2015 – New England Aquarium Simons IMAX Theatre, Boston (MA)
08 – IMAX2D (DOME) – No later than April 20, 2015 – Planetario Puebla Omnimax Theater, Puebla (Mexico)
09 – DIGITAL3D – May 22, 2015 – Houston Museum of Natural Science 3D Theater, Houston (TX)
10 – DIGITAL3D – May 23, 2015 – New Mexico Museum of Natural History Lockheed-Martin DYNA Theatre, Albuquerque (NM)
11 – DIGITAL3D – June 12, 2015 – Milwaukee Public Museum 3D Theater, Milwaukee (WI)
12 – DIGITAL3D – July 10, 2015 – American Museum of Natural History 3D Theatre, New York City (NY)
13 – IMAX3D (DIGITAL) – No later than August 30, 2015 – Challenger Learning Center IMAX, Tallahassee (FL)