Movie review: The Last Reef 3D | canada.com

The Last Reef 3D

4 stars out of 5

Narrated by: Jamie Lee

Directed by: Luke Cresswell, Steve McNicholas

Running time: 40 minutes

Parental guidance: No problems

There are many astonishing things to look at in The Last Reef 3D: multicoloured nudibranchs, or sea slugs, that wiggle through the ocean, their lumpy decorated bodies looking for all the world like tube pasta on acid; flatworms that move by sending waves along their paper-thin bodies, mobile crepes of the sea; schools of jellyfish that pulse right off the screen, the amazing 3D inviting you to reach out and grab at the air in front of your face.

All of them ? giant oddities on the big Imax screen ? are part of the world of the reef, a world that the movie tells us is disappearing because of pollution and carbon dioxide emissions. It?s a grim and important (and sadly familiar) message, but delivered this time in the company of irresistibly unlikely creatures of a fascinating undersea world.

Directors Luke Cresswell and Steve McNicholas also created the dance show Stomp, and they have a deep appreciation for the musical orchestration of amazement and the choreography of the eccentric. The Last Reef 3D is subtitled Cities Beneath the Sea, and the film finds analogies between the reef and New York City.

For one thing, both of them have a sucker born every minute.

The traffic is also similar ? the crowds of electric blue fish skittering this way and that aren?t that far removed from what you see every weekend in Times Square ? but the reefs are an even better place to watch the world go by. Using innovative cameras, underwater cinematographer D.J. Roller takes us into a hidden world where, for instance, we see the amazing camouflage of crocodile fish that lurk at the bottom of the ocean, looking for all the world like sand with teeth, or clown fish (hi Nemo!) hide in the poisonous tendrils of sea anemone, safe from predators, or a remarkably diverse collection of mollusks, absurdly colourful and be-tendriled creatures that deserve their own reality shows.

A reef is a living thing, partly animal and partly plant, and they are even more important to the ocean?s health than tropical rainforests are to our oxygen supply. The dangers are numerous: global warming, human interference, all the usual suspects of a collapsing ecology, with the addition of sunscreen, which also harms reefs.

The movie begins with an older disaster: the atom bomb tests at Bikini Atoll in the Pacific Ocean 1946 (to the accompaniment of the French classic La Mer). The explosions wiped out the reefs in the area, but 50 years later they had returned.

That?s where The Last Reef finds its final note of hope. In the meantime, The Last Reef is the ultimate record of a rich, endangered universe.

Source: http://o.canada.com/2013/01/17/movie-review-the-last-reef-3d/

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