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Visions of the Sea Blu-ray Review |
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Visions of the Sea Blu-ray
PBS | 2009 | 55 mins | Not rated | Oct 13, 2009
Visions of the Sea Blu-ray ReviewNot all visions are meant to be seen.Reviewed by Casey Broadwater, November 23, 2009 Maybe you're a marine biology student, an animal lover, or a scuba enthusiast looking for an underwater fix to carry you through the winter months, for a documentary that captures the sense of awe you feel toward the natural world. Perhaps you're a picture quality junkie, jonesing for the latest high definition showpiece or an undersea-themed screensaver for your television, something to impress guests who are new to Blu-ray. Or, it could be that you just really love and support PBS. Whoever you are, Visions of the Sea—I'm sorry to say—will probably disappoint you. Poorly paced and edited, and featuring some of the worst picture quality I've seen in some time, Visions of the Sea simply can't compete with The Blue Planet and other oceanic documentaries that have set sail of Blu-ray.
There's nothing visionary about Visions of the Sea. Featuring footage culled from the archives of famed underwater cinematographer Al Geddings—who has worked on The Abyss, The Deep, and several projects with oceanographer Dr. Sylvia Earle—the documentary is wrapped around a skeletal narration by Geraint Davies (yes, of Cube 2: Hypercube) that emphasizes the evolution of life in the oceans. "At our core, we're all children of the sea," Davies begins, before spending the rest of the program elucidating some of the genetic traits we share with our earliest sea-dwelling ancestors. Don't expect him to go into any real detail, however. This is like a 101 course in ocean history, if that, and those with even the most cursory knowledge of evolutionary principles will feel like the smart kid, so bored in class that she tunes out the teacher and simply stares at the chalkboard. And there's plenty to see, though it's edited together clumsily, with long stretches of silence and a lot of repetition. Giant tubeworms, five feet long and as thick as human arms, sprout from the ocean floor. A chambered nautilus spurts by, its fundamental design changed little in 450 million years. We see a cuttlefish embryo inside its egg, looking like an unborn alien, complete with big, almond-shaped eyes and an enormous oval head. The boundaries between plant and animal life are blurred when we're shown a crinoid, which looks like a giant feather duster but whose palm frond-like appendages are actually tentacles that snatch unsuspecting prey out of the surrounding sea. A giant pillow starfish somehow looks simultaneously like a beanbag chair and a naked fat man. We're shown examples of symbiosis, told how the advent of vertebra altered the evolutionary ladder, and are reminded that almost every element of human anatomy can be traced to a precursor in fish. I'm a big fan of nature documentaries, but I wasn't impressed, educated, or even remotely entertained by Visions of the Sea. When compared to some of the better ocean-themed documentaries out there, the cinematography here is lackluster, which is surprising considering Al Geddings' underwater pedigree. Though I can't be sure, it seems like Visions of the Sea is comprised of previously shot footage, and I'd be willing to bet that nothing was shot specifically for this documentary. The production just seems thrown together and unfocused. The narration is dry and uninvolving, the choice of music is truly terrible—I'll get to that later—and I can't even recommend the program as a TV "screensaver," because the picture quality is practically unredeemable. I can imagine Visions of the Sea looped on repeat in a dentist's waiting room, or better yet, playing in the lobby of a nursing home while two or three residents doze fitfully in the blue glow of the television. I picture the orderly getting bored and turning the channel to Wheel of Fortune. No one cares or even notices. Unfortunately, this is no maritime masterpiece. Video  The ever-expanding Blu-ray catalog includes more than a few undersea adventures, and unfortunately Visions of the Sea isn't among the best of them in picture quality. PBS has given the title a 1080i/AVC-encoded presentation that is more than just rough around the edges; it's positively rough. I have a kind of mental checklist when I'm reviewing picture quality, and Visions of the Sea checks nearly all the traits in the cons column. The video is laced with near-constant artifacts and noise, macroblocking breaks detail and texture into compressed chunks, aliasing turns fine lines into jagged stair-step patterns, and banding is readily apparent in subtle color gradients. There are occasional ghosting issues, edgy lines with black halos, color fluctuations, brightness flickering, and a strange series of periodic white flashes that lasts for about a minute past the 9:13 mark. It literally looks like someone is setting off a camera- mounted flash, which might explain the problem but doesn't make it any less distracting. Some of the colors look distorted, as if they had been artificially saturated to make them more vivid. Overall clarity is middling, sporadically sharp but often limited by the aforementioned compression problems and by the nature of undersea photography itself. A lot of the material looks upscaled from standard definition, and I'd be surprised if it wasn't. I had a single moment when I thought, "Ah, the pastel colors of that parrotfish look nice." Other than that, I really wasn't happy at all with the video quality here. Visions of the Sea doesn't hold a candlefish—terrible pun, I know, but it is a real fish—to some of the better underwater documentaries. Audio  Unfortunately, I don't have much good to say about Visions of the Sea's measly Dolby Digital 2.0 track either. Narrator Geraint Davies' slowly intoned sentences are easy to understand, but that's the best that I—and this track—can muster. I know this is entirely subjective, but the music selection here is terrible, sometimes muzak-bad and sometimes just completely incongruous, with musical non sequiturs like the jaunty Irish jig that plays over the intro. When bombastic classical music accompanies a scene of serenely floating jellyfish, the film fails to earn a comparison to 2001: A Space Odyssey. I knew I was in for trouble when I booted up the disc, got to the menu, and heard Gregorian chanting over some dated, mid-1990s down-tempo electronica. As you might expect, the music sounds compressed, with a squashed range and little-to-no bass response. I wish there was an option to turn the music off, keep the narration on, and blast something better out of my stereo. Supplements  Underwater Adventures (1080i, 56:22) Nearly an hour of additional footage is gathered together here and set to some of the worst royalty- free music that you don't need money to buy. This is more of the same, really, but without the narration. Final words If you're looking for an ocean-themed documentary, a soothing viewing experience, or just a screensaver for your television, I'd skip Visions of the Sea altogether and look elsewhere. There are plenty of other titles that will better fit the bill. This is one has truly bad picture quality, a brain-numbing soundtrack, and a narration that will put you to sleep long before it teaches you anything. 
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