Coral Reef Adventure

Narrated by Liam Neeson, with a distorted Crosby, Stills, & Nash score that sounds like it was run through a South Pacific island Yanni mixer, the MacGillivray Freeman IMAX big screen Coral Reef Adventure employs a condescendingly fictional (presented as factual) framing device in which Fiji diver Rusi Vulakoro's concern over the local dying coral reef sparks an S.O.S. call to scientific “ocean explorers” (translation: underwater cinematographers) Howard and Michele Hall, who dive coral reefs all over the South Pacific--including the Great Barrier Reef--to compare and confirm that coral reef damage results from global warming, over-fishing, and silt build-up from rainforest logging (all of which may be true, although it's presented here with very little scientific backing). On the plus side, the underwater cinematography is indeed very good (but also at times deceptive--after the brilliant color shots of healthy coral reef, for instance, we're shown stunningly bleak footage of Fiji's coral reef in a sequence that might have had more dramatic oomph were it not for the tropical fish swimming by in black-and-white), and the concerns raised by the film over the future of coral reefs are valid. Unfortunately, the film feels manipulative from first frame to last (confirmed by the 34-minute “making of” documentary included on the disc), and some of the staged bits (including a “traditional” Fiji ceremony blessing the Halls' dive) are rather lame and pointless. Featuring both widecsreen and full screen options, with DTS or Dolby Digital 5.1 sound, the disc's other extras include a four-minute self-congratulatory film on MacGillivray Freeman IMAX productions, a looping “ambient” video that's supposed to be a “virtual aquarium” (although it begs the quip: “waiter, there's a diver in my fish bowl”), and a second disc with a Windows Media Player 9-playable high-definition version of the film (the jacket notes recommend a system running at “2.4 GHz” or higher with “384 MB of RAM”--mine runs at 2.53 GHz with 504 MB of RAM, and this crashed it big time, so I wouldn't recommend trying this with less than a 3.0 GHz processor). Optional. Aud: J, H, C, P. (R. Pitman)