Ocean with David Attenborough: A thrilling, ravishing call to action to save the world's seas

Telegraph

06-05-2025

David Attenborough turns 99 on Thursday – though his latest film, which opens in cinemas that very day, is a timely release in more ways than one. Next month in France, world governments will convene for the Third United Nations Ocean Conference – at which, his film argues, the futures of the world's undersea habitats and their many inhabitants will be at stake.
This cracking campaigning documentary makes a galvanising case for action – and without lobbing its audience overboard with an anchor weight of hopelessness yoked to their heels. It first shows the otherworldly splendour and variegation of our planet's sea life, then sets out the overfishing crisis that mortally threatens it, before suggesting an achievable-sounding rescue plan that can be quickly enacted with enough political will and public support. (Probably in the opposite order.)
We've done something similar before, our host reminds us in that unmistakable voice like butter being spread across hot toast. In the 1970s, commercial whaling had reduced the global population of those wondrous mammals to one per cent of its original levels. All hope for their survival seemed lost – until ordinary people became sufficiently moved by the creatures' plight that it suddenly wasn't.
Positioning the push to end overfishing as 'the greatest opportunity for humanity in my lifetime', Attenborough, who delivers his narration perched on a groyne on a beach grey enough to be British, enters his 100th year on the planet with an optimistic glow. And it's infectious – thanks in no small part to the eye-widening wonder and patient craftsmanship of the film built around it.
Attenborough's oeuvre has featured numerous scenes like the ones in Ocean before. But they're freshened here both by the 4K photography, by turns painterly and crisp, and the sense of scale conferred by the cinema screen itself. A sequence of zooplankton feasting on phytoplankton – which probably occurred within about a thimble's worth of seawater, tops – resembles a pitched battle from a trippy sci-fi epic. A swarm of spindly lobster larvae looks less like a group of actual living beings than their Into the Spider-Verse animated counterparts.
Such microscopic spectacles were mysteries until fairly recently – but then our understanding of the oceans overall, Attenborough argues, have altered immeasurably over the course of his career as a naturalist. Directors Toby Nowlan, Colin Butfield and Keith Scholey deftly stitch that shift in perspective into a number of scenes. We've all seen banks of seaweed before, but I'm not sure I've ever seen them photographed in rolling top-down vistas, as if they were forests. (Which, of course, Ocean reminds us, they are.) The sense of mystery about the world beneath the waves is both embraced and dispelled: subaquatic mountain ranges are plotted on maps, recasting these vast empty spaces between continents as landscapes in their own right.
Attenborough's narration – poetic, erudite, neat – guides the audience through a number of harrowing scenes, many of which lay bare the destruction wreaked by industrial trawlers on environments formed over centuries, then torn up in seconds by the scrape of a chain-weighted net. Yet the nuance of the argument isn't lost. Fishing and overfishing are different things: the struggle isn't positioned as industry versus conservation so much as humanity versus a far-reaching disaster that's still avoidable, just. For all human parties concerned, more fish in the sea would be good news, and their ecosystem hasn't had its chips quite yet.