Sundance 2017 – Chasing Coral
To be honest, the only thing I knew about corals before going into Jeff Orlowski’s latest global warming documentary, Chasing Coral, was what I learned in Finding Nemo (2003). As you can imagine, Finding Nemo did teach me much. But, unlike the adorable animated movie, Orlowski’s film teaches you everything and anything about corals, from their anatomy to the unfortunate future of corals.
Chasing Coral is a film about a group of divers, photographers, and scientists who set out to find out why so many coral reefs are vanishing at a rapid rate.
Like Orlowski’s last documentary, Chasing Ice (2012), this is a film that shows what climate change is doing to our planet. In Chasing Ice, it was the melting of the polar icecaps. Here, it is about how the rise in temperature water is causing mass bleaching among all corals and killing them. And what Orlowski does a great job of doing is explaining to us why this is important. How these corals keep us as humans alive and what can happen to the human race is they go extinct. It is a truly eye opening and scary realization to hear.
Corals aren’t exactly the most exciting subject in the world, regardless of what you do with them, unless you had them grow and eat people. But, this movie is easily the most exciting movie you could make about corals. The visuals of these corals is jaw-dropping. There are so many different shapes, colors, and classifications of coral, all of which I had no idea about. We get to see these corals at full health, acting as protection for fish and growing over time. The camera is almost like a fish, smoothly moving through the ocean, catching every kind of creature from crabs, to sharks, to thousands of fish and how they all use these corals to live. And then we see the stark contrast of what is happening to them. Seeing these larger than life lifeforms turn into nothing but rubble is shocking and depressing.
Chasing Coral is a film that will 100% convince you global warming is real and that is a real global issue. The movie really hammers this point at the end, yet informing us a bleak, troubling future if we do not do something. We must save these beautiful creatures from extinction or we too will be extinct.
MY RATING – 3/4
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