Effect can be cloying (“Whoooh, let’s get out of here!” the turtle says once the great-white segment is over) but it’s also disarming. Information is well narrated by Geoffrey Bateman, lending his wry British accent to the voice of a sea turtle that swims regularly in front of the cameras to comment on the action, sometimes rather obviously. Like most educational docs, pic intermittently drifts into save-the-environment didacticism, sketching a portrait of animals that are far more frequently victimized by human beings than vice versa. That’s about as close as the images come to generating suspense, determined as pic is to present its subjects in the most flattering possible light - highly efficient killers that nevertheless are rarely hungry and have little appetite for human flesh. In one of the more intense sequences, McKinney’s cameras follow a sea lion warily trailing a shark that has just finished feeding in another, a mother dolphin shields her young from a pair of hungry predators. The sheer diversity of fish on display is the first indication that “Sharks 3D’s” title is a bit misleading: While the pic does offer up-close-and-personal looks at sharks of many varieties, from silvertips, hammerheads and gray reefs to great whites and whale sharks, pic also devotes substantial face-time to other species. Later, seemingly thousands of sardines display their abilities in synchronized swimming, in a shot that could easily furnish the world’s coolest screensaver. In one image, a multitude of tiny, iridescent jellyfish swim close enough to all but tickle the eyeballs, resembling a shimmering pink-brocade curtain. This may be eye-candy masked as ecological advocacy, but if so, it’s eye-candy of a very high caliber. Gavin McKinney, pic serves as an effective giant-screen rebuttal to recent DV horror film “Open Water” - it gives deep-sea predators their proper due, and it’s gorgeous to behold. Culled from more than 500 hours of diving footage shot over nine months by helmer Jean-Jacques Mantello and ace underwater d.p.
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