When the tsunami slammed into Phuket, it did more than kill tens of thousands of people. Creatures from miles beneath the sea were washed ashore, many of them like something out of an extraterrestrial zoo. The premise of director James Cameron’s new Imax documentary, Aliens of the Deep 3D, is that learning about these strange beings, which thrive in a place once thought incapable of supporting life, gives us the next best thing to an encounter with life-forms from another planet.
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Fans of Cameron’s sci-fi action movies may be disappointed to learn that this is not a cross between Aliens and The Abyss—though Disney’s ad people have been happy to suggest that it is. It was The Abyss that sparked Cameron’s fascination with the ocean depths, leading to Titanic and then to Ghosts of the Abyss (2003), his Imax documentary about his real-life expedition through the ship’s wreckage. But there’s plenty of evidence here that he’s still a director first and an explorer second.
But the best parts of the film come when the underwater cameras simply record the wonders on hand around volcanoes three kilometers below sea level. Expanding on some of the sights captured for the Imax film Volcanoes of the Deep Sea (2003), which Cameron produced, the 3-D photography takes us to a corner of the world where heat vents spew gases into the water under intense pressure and the sun never shines. It would seem nothing could possibly live here, yet we’re shown creatures in abundance: ethereal rings of tissue swim about like ghosts, huge worms consume nutrients despite lacking stomachs, millions of shrimplike animals swarm over beds of wispy bacteria. Framing a shot of a squid with gently flapping flippers on its head and white, downy-looking skin, Cameron remarks that he “could watch this guy all day.”
Directed by James Cameron and Steven Quale
