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I'd like to consider myself a fairly good
journalist so I... wait, scratch that.
I'd like to consider myself the
best journalist in the history of the written word!
Anyway, where was
I? Oh, who cares. I just tried to do my best not to wet myself while
watching Sharkwater.
Rob Stewart has quite the opposite intention, jumping into the water with the slippery beasts at any opportunity.
The
man has been transfixed by sharks from a young age, and became an
underwater photographer in order to get closer to them. He is clearly
at home in the water, swimming with, touching and playing with sharks
as if they were friendly dogs.
Some of the moments during which
Stewart is shown with the sharks are amazingly eye-opening, and prove
that they are not the mindless killing machines that the general public
perceives them to be.
However, they can be, and this is something that the film ignores.
Sure,
more elephants kill people per year than sharks, but that's because
humans live amongst elephants on land. More people are killed per year
by vending machines than sharks, but that's because vending machines
are literally everywhere.
Some of the information presented throughout Sharkwater is incredibly fascinating.
Sharks
have two more senses than humans! They perceive the world in a
completely different way to us. They are completely incomprehensible
and impossible to understand and that definitely feeds our fear of
them.
The film does a lot to pry those fears from us,
illuminating the darkest of our shark phobias and converting them into
reverence and understanding.
Sharkwater is beautiful to watch. The scenes featuring schools of Hammerhead sharks are just incredible. Absolutely incredible.
However, the most poignant and effective parts of the film deal with the fishing of sharks for their meat and their fins.
Stewart
clearly feels a huge amount of sympathy and compassion for the sharks,
and the audience definitely empathises with Stewart. You just have to
see some of the images of sharks dangling lifeless from fishing lines
or from the backs of boats to realise how cruel we humans can be.
The film features the efforts by Stewart and other to protect sharks, and exposes how silly some of the shark-haters really are.
Sharkwater
is ultimately an amazingly interesting documentary that shines a
fascinating, new light on one of the scariest and least deadly animals
in the world.
Having said that, I'm still terrified of them - my solution: don't swim in the ocean...
DVD EXTRAS
The DVD includes several special features; a couple of
featurettes and some photographs.
As it's a documentary, an audio
commentary definitely would have been too much, so I'd have to say the
extras are sufficient and add to the main feature without ever being that
great.
Conclusion:
Movie 85% Extras: 75%
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