Big-scale film director James Cameron, 61, produced his
autobiographical adventure “Deepsea Challenge 3D” (directed by John Bruno, Ray
Quint and Andrew Wright), partly to document his own career transition to
explorer. He has a devoted wife and five children, and he says that pursuing
his own goals is a way to set a good example for his kids, using somewhat
libertarian thinking. Cameron looks lean and fit in this film as a man entering his seventh decade, ready for a military-like naval adventure.
The endgame was to dive in a special sub, built around a “sphere”
to house Cameron at the end, to a depth of 36000 feet, in the New Britain
channel, off the New Guinea coast, north of Australia.
Cameron finds no obvious organisms at this depth. Few animals
except tubeworms can live at depths much over one mile. Cameron does take some bottom samples to look
for bacteria. The area of land in these
deep trenches has an area about that of North America.
Cameron does show some sea cucumbers and a new jellyfish, but no "box jellyfish" (July 13 and July 16).
Cameron mentions his earlier big films, “The Abyss” (1989)
and “Titanic” (1997) and shows some more footage of the Titanic.
He also introduces much of the Australian crew working for
him. A few crew men are played by actors (Lachlan Woods and Frank Lotito). The people do have to work in very close quarters, like in the Navy in a submarine. There are many scenes around Sydney harbor
early in the film, which had considerable Australian financing.
Later, there are impressive scenes of the volcanoes of New Guinea; major villages were destroyed (I'm not sure which community was shown, as there have been so many eruptions; children were playing in the ruins.) Cameron says that the landscapes inspired the design of planet Pandora in "Avatar".
Just before the closing credits, Cameron shows images of the Moon, Mars, and Jupiter, as if to suggest he would like to go. Pretty soon, it will be appropriate to consider what kind of person could move to Mars to start a settlement, live there permanently, and never return. I think Titan is interesting.
The official site is
here, from National Geographic. The
distributor seems to be “Disruptive LA”.
I saw this in a small auditorium at Regal Ballston Monday
night. It seemed to be a performance
just for me.
Wikipedia attribution
link for tubeworm picture.
This is a good place to mention the 1998 science fiction
film “Sphere” by Barry Levinson, based on a novel by Michael Crichton, about a
relic alien submarine discovered in the abyss, perhaps recalling Cameron’s own
film.
Tonight, the media is covering heavily the death of actor Robin Williams, at 63. More about that on my TV blog.
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