Last Thursday, April 13, my husband Charles and I saw three movies during the day and evening that I’ve been wanting to write about. The first was the Omnimax presentation of a 2018 nature documentary called Turtle Odyssey. It’s been a while since Charles and/or I went to a movie in the Omnimax or similar Imax format (I’d forgotten how enveloping the screen is, especially in the Omnimax version in which the screen is a curved semi-circle and you see the movie from inside a half-dome), and it really does look like the world is enclosing you. Turtle Odyssey is a 45-minute documentary narrated by Russell Crowe – who seems to have been picked because both he and Bunjee (Aboriginal for “friend”), the sea turtle at the center of the action, are Australian. It begins on an Australian beach on which Bunjee is the last of her litter to hatch, and the film depicts the mad race Bunjee and the others have to make from the dry ground where they’re hatched to the ocean to be able to survive at all. The narration by Anekia McCarten and Paul Phelan, based on an “original idea” by David Gross (one wonders what his “original idea” was – did he sit or stand at a meeting one day and say, “Let’s do a documentary about sea turtles!”), explains that only one of 100 sea turtle hatchlings ever makes it to the ocean and a shot at life, though it also explains that if htey get all the breaks right a sea turtle can live over 100 years.
Among the predators that cut short their lives are seagulls and crabs, and these predators form an obstacle course through which the sea turtle mast o make it to the water to live – and once they get to the water,then they have to contend with sharks. The biggest vulnerability for a sea turtle is that they’re amphibian and therefore don’t breathe under water through gills like fish do; instead, they have to come up periodically for air, and the sight of a sea turtle’s head poking itself above the water for a gulp of air is often just what an airborne predator needs to spot it, pounce and make it dinner. To avoid this, sea turtles have the ability to slow their heart rate to just one eat per minute so they can stay underwater longer. The film also dramatized the dangers sea turtles are in from us, including the ill effects of climate change, which among other things is ruining the gender balance of the sea turtle population. As the ocean gets warmer,the narration writers explain, for some reason more girl sea turtles are born than boy turtles. That could render the population extinct in no time if there aren’t enough male sea turtles to fuck the females and keep the species alive.
Humans are also screwing up the lives of sea tirtles in a way I knew about already and is documented in the film; there’s a scene of Bunjee swimming past a plastic bag, and Russell Crowe sternly warns Bunjee not to eat the bag because to a turtle, a plastic bag looks like a jellyfish, one of their major food sources, and if she eats it she will choke and die. Turtle Odyssey offers the standard annoying tendency in nature documentaries ever since Walt Disney started making them in 1949: picking certain species as the “good guys” and others as the “bad guys,” and reinforcing those decisions with narration and especially music. It occurred to me that the makers of documentaries like the early-2000’s Academy Award contender Winged Migration would make seagulls the good guys where here they’re definitely the bad guys. Other than that, Turtle Odyssey is a visually extraordinary movie – there’s a separate camera crew credited with the 3-D photography,and they deserve every bit of acknowledgment (and money) they got – even though it’s a pretty standard-issue nature film with only the stunning photography and Crowe’s narration to make it stand out.
