The Ocean on Screen: From Jaws to Blue Planet - How Film Shaped Our Perception of the Sea

The depiction of oceans and seas in film goes back to the development of the motion picture, although underwater scenes proved costly and prevented the proliferation of this genre. By the 1950s, new underwater technologies made fictional accounts and documentaries possible. The development of movies depicted the oceans as a realm endangering humanity or an underwater paradise. On the other hand, documentaries introduced another dimension: the potentially devastating impact of human beings on seascapes.

The first major film to depict the ocean was a 1916 silent adaptation of Jules Verne’s novel Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. Filming the underwater scenes, however, significantly increased the costs and delayed its launch. Movie producers thus shied away from such expensive endeavors and opted for feature films firmly rooted on dry land. Following the Second World War, with the development, especially SCUBA, of underwater technology, movies depicting the ocean and marine life increased. Disney Studios, for instance, supported yet another cinematographic adaptation of Twenty Thousand Leagues in 1954.

In this film, the sea becomes a realm of exile and refuge for the main character, Captain Nemo, who derives fuel, food, and clothing from this underwater Garden of Eden. Two years later, in a movie adaptation of Moby-Dick, an alternative, more sinister vision of the sea emerges: dangerous life-threatening seascapes and marine life, in this case, a rare albino whale. The same year, Jacques Cousteau took cameras below the surface not for dramatic entertainment but to unveil the ocean’s mysteries in his Silent World.

The dichotomy between the sea as a benevolent and a destructive force continued over the next two decades with the release of Flipper (1963) and Jaws (1975). They depict dolphins as aquatic mammals supporting human actions while at the same time demonizing sharks as malevolent assassins preying on unsuspecting people and requiring bigger boats to hunt them down. Jaws would create a template for murderous sea life that would dominate the genre of sharks for the next fifty years with such entries as Deep Blue Sea (1999), Open Water (2004), Sharknado (2013), and The Meg (2018). However, the murderous marine organism genre developed in unveiling how harmful human intervention in the sea pushes the species out of their home waters to prey on humans. For instance, the sequel Meg 2 (2023) has humans mining rare minerals in the Mariana Trench, and explosions ultimately drive the megalodons into waters teeming with tourists. Similarly, while the dolphin depicted in Flipper reflects the benign ocean forces, it assists humans in finding schools of fish and actively contributes to overfishing.

Similarities between Star Trek and Maritime History. Star Trek is a media franchise launched by Gene Roddenberry that has become a worldwide sensation since it initially launched in the 1960s. Few Trekkies or Trekkers—as the devoted fans of this franchise prefer to call themselves—are aware that Roddenberry borrowed heavily from maritime history to get his ideas across. In the original series, the starship Enterprise was a synonym for Captain Cook’s Endeavour, which took the illustrious navigator on his first circumnavigation. The captain of Gene Roddenberry’s starship is James Tiberius Kirk, whose name is also closely associated with his British counterpart. Kirk exclaims in his opening monologue of the series: “to boldly go where no man has gone before.” This statement parallels Cook’s journal entry: “Ambition leads me . . . farther than any man has before me.”

Gene Roddenberry’s follow-up series, appropriately entitled The Next Generation, witnesses another Enterprise series starship captained by a Frenchman named Jean- Luc Picard. The name was inspired by Swiss inventor and scientist Auguste Piccard, who developed the first bathyscaphe—a deep-sea submersible, among other things. Rainer F. Buschmann

Besides good or evil marine life, the oceans also served as a dramatic backdrop for natural or imagined shipping disasters depicted in such movies as The Poseidon Adventure (1972), Titanic (1997), and The Perfect Storm (2000). A related genre uses the world’s oceans as a background for global conflict: The Enemy Below (1957), Das Boot (1981), Hunt for the Red October (1990), and Midway (1976/2019). Rarer yet are films that treat the whole ocean as a disaster, usually due to a Tsunami—Tidal Wave (1975)—or as the result of environmental climate change, as in The Day After Tomorrow (2004). Besides the marine war genre, where humans stand entirely front and center of the action, ocean disaster movies over the last two decades often start with human-polluting action as a trigger.

Over the last sixty years, documentaries have sought less to entertain or thrill the masses. Their impact is more in education, and rarely do they appear on the silver screen. Such films have revealed what lies beneath and have battled the stereotypes frequently set up by feature films. For instance, documentary filmmakers have worked tirelessly to overcome the image of sharks as murderous creatures, which Jaws cemented. Recent documentaries reveal sharks are an integral part of the marine ecosystem and that attacks on humans are rare and sometimes provoked. Humans have emerged as a far greater threat to sharks than the other way around by hunting them for their dorsal fins, considered a delicacy.

Besides rehabilitating sharks, documentary filmmakers over the last twenty years have uncovered that the true challenge to the ocean does not reside in it but lives closer to its shore. The popular series Blue Planet, produced by the BBC, best illustrates this shift in perspective. First released in 2001 as an eight-episode series to explore the natural history of oceans, it became a widely watched and highly decorated documentary. While it was mostly a descriptive film depicting the oceans and the organisms that call it home, the organizers, realizing the show’s success, quickly added a special titled “Deep Trouble” that highlighted the devastating practice of overfishing. Then, in 2017, another run of episodes was added as Blue Planet II. Starting with new scientific insights that emerged over the fifteen years, the documentary departed from merely depicting the ocean’s natural history and placed the human impact inside some episodes. The last installment, “Our Blue Planet,” especially highlighted humanity’s polluting effects through microplastics. Largely hailed as the most-watched program in the UK, Blue Planet II affected many British companies and even the government to ban and find alternatives to single-use plastics. In addition, the series did much to undermine the common misconceptions that the sea is vast, endless, and beyond the reach of humans.

Not all documentaries had the impact of Blue Planet. When, in 2021, Netflix launched its feature-film-length documentary Seaspiracy, which featured the detrimental environmental effects of fishing, its critical reception was mixed at best. While some highlighted the vital treatment of overfishing and ghost netting, others dismissed its journalistic sensationalism that glossed over nuances and denied the possibilities of sustainable fisheries and aquaculture.

In short, while the seas and oceans have been depicted in many feature films over the last century, the images still distorted the watery surfaces as either idyllic, untouched havens or a threat to humanity. In addition, oceans frequently emerged as endless and thus outside of human influence. Only recently, and mainly through documentaries, have such distorted visions of the oceans been corrected, and the full extent of the threat to the sea has become apparent. Rainer F. Buschmann

FURTHER READING: Helmreich, Stefan. 2018. “Massive Movie Waves and the Anthropic Ocean.” Social Science Information 57 (3): 494-521.

Kennerson, Elliot. 2008. “Ocean Pictures: The Construction of the Ocean on Film.” M.A. Thesis, Montana State University, Bozeman.

Miskolzce, Robin. 2020. “From Moby-Dick to Contemporary Documentary: Experiencing the Oceanic.” Leviathan 22 (3): 25-42.