Film Reviews

Documentary: Mission Blue

After watching this film I was left with a call to change the way we look at the ocean as a secondary mission. It is definitely in our hands to be able to preserve the ocean from the constant harm it faces due to human pollution and reliance. Even though this documentary did not explicitly establish an argument it still posed many circumstances in which the imagery we are shown makes the audience feel inclined to help the ocean. For example the film introduces images and videos of the 2010 deep water oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico making the audience feel moved to empathize for whats happened to the oceans due to human intervention. Reviews mentioned a lot about the sexism involved in this documentary due to the stereotype that men are more prone to handling hard and heavy work building such as scuba diving. This was proved wrong by Sylvia Earle, the renowned oceanographer and marine biologist that has accomplished so many feats as a woman in the field. It says that "Mission Blue has fun sending up the dated, wink-wink sexism of such coverage; conversely, however, one doubts the film makers here would ask a male quite so many wide-eyed questions about his marriages, or the difficulty juggling child raising with a busy career. (Stevens also says things like, 'when you say "studying seaweed," what do you mean?" and "Sylvia, the minute I met you, you became an example for me, I mean like really," as if the film's intended audience were Nickelodeon viewers.)". This is a strong example of stereotypical reviews based on the simple fact that the person who has accomplished so many things in the field of marine biology just so happens to be a woman. Little do we hear people ask men how they deal with marriage and kids while doing hard work which is a critique on the character of a documentary just simply because of their gender. I think the genre of a film review depends entirely on the kind of attack or critique the reviewer has in both their personal and business goals. Like this example was a review which targeted the gender of the scuba diver. This to me makes the review seem less credible and biased to whether they are judging the film for its argument or for the plain reason of the marine biologist being a woman. I think it would be better for reviews to be impartial and neutral in their comments in order to have more of an impact on the producers.