Earth daze

A giant whorl of bigeye trevally spins around, forming a light-fused, pointillistic orb. Golden sea nettles puff open and shut like Japanese anime space creatures.

The music is symphonic, the cinematography spectacular, the narration — ay, there's the rub. In Oceans, the latest Disney nature documentary, the voice-over almost manages to turn the majestic into the mundane.

Almost.

Directed by Jacques Perrin and Jacques Cluzaud, the intrepid French filmmakers behind 2001's Oscar-nominated avian epic Winged Migration, this deep-sea extravaganza spans the continents — and the continental shelves — to capture the life aquatic.

"What exactly is the ocean? What is the sea?" wonders Pierce Brosnan, our susurrating emcee. "In a very real sense," he tells us a few beats later, "it's alive."

Cut to a marine iguana, like something from a '50s monster movie, swimming nonchalantly through the waters off the Galápagos Islands. Equating Earth's vast oceanic ecosystems to galaxies in space ("the larvae of a sea urchin is like an asteroid"), Oceans rockets off to the coastal waters of South Africa and South America, to the Caribbean and the Mediterranean, the Arctic and Antarctic. There are sea lions basking in the sun, and sea turtle hatchlings running for their lives — literally — as a flock of frigate birds swoops down and the newborns scuttle for cover in the lapping tides.

More celebratory than scientific, Oceans, for the most part, avoids the anthropomorphic tendencies of old-school nature docs that related the behavior of mammals and marine life to humans. But that doesn't stop Brosnan from delivering more than a few distracting inanities. (Most egregious: "If dragons really do exist, this is where you'll find the narwhal — the unicorn of the seas." Huh?)

But if you can tune out the blather, Oceans is well worth the trip. The dramatic high point has to be a frenzied jam of dolphins and whales, gulls and sharks, all feeding furiously on a giant school of sardines.

The shots of the blue whales — half a city block long, the largest animals on the planet — and the beautiful tour of the Great Barrier Reef, where clown fish dart among anemones, exotic eels, and bug-eyed crabs, are sublime. The scenes of orcas stalking sea lions are fascinating for their predatory matter-of-factness. And there's the inevitable we're-wrecking-this-place section of Oceans, featuring shots of swordfish and endangered bluefin tuna trapped in nets; a seal looking at a submerged and rusted shopping cart; a polar bear navigating melting ice floes; and satellite images of rivers spilling poisons and pollutants into the seas.

"Human indifference is sadly the oceans' greatest threat," Brosnan laments. But if a few kids — and parents — find themselves upset by such news, Oceans just might motivate them to do something about it.

Contact movie critic Steven Rea at 215-854-5629 or srea@phillynews.com. Read his blog, "On Movies Online," at http://www.philly.com/philly/blogs/onmovies/.