Undersea eruption
By Carrie Lock

This is no Dante’s Peak.

There are movies, and then there are IMAX movies. The 65-foot by 85-foot screen is the size of 4,500 television sets, and the 44 surrounding speakers pump out 12,000 watts of power. It makes watching regular movies about as thrilling as watching QVC on television. IMAX is extreme entertainment.

Volcanoes of the Deep Sea is typical IMAX fare, stunning images and heavy on the science. For those who love NOVA and Bill Nye (the Science Guy), this combo is like a Porterhouse steak after the Big Mac of most Hollywood movies. And for those who think education and entertainment are mutually exclusive, well, did I mention the stunning images? You won’t even realize you’re learning something, I promise.

The film opens with a voiceover by geologist Peter Roma, describing his honeymoon in Spain. There, he says, fifty years ago, he stumbled across a fossil that no one had ever seen before. It looked like a round stamp of a honeycomb, the hexagonal cells permanently etched in stone. Neither Roma nor any other scientist could figure out what creature could have possibly left this imprint.

Enter ALVIN, the underwater submersible vehicle used for decades to explore the open seas, and star of last year’s IMAX Titanic exploration story, Ghosts of the Abyss. Through its electronic eyes, we are taken on a voyage to alien regions where sunlight never penetrates. In the inky black South Pacific, over 8500 feet below sea level off the coast of the Galapagos Islands, elaborate underwater chimneys spew forth thick gray pillars of smoke like a burning oil field, and red worms thrive on the poisonous hydrogen sulfide spewing out of the volcanoes. We see the bottom of the sea floor near the mid-Atlantic ridge--not bland mud, sand, or silt, but bulbous dark worms of cracked lava slithering their way across the Earth’s crust. We even go on a computer-generated tour of how our sun, solar system, and planet formed, focusing on the roiling chaos of the furnace sitting at Earth’s core.

In the most impressive footage of the film, the camera descends into the vast chasm formed as the American and European tectonic plates pull apart. A glowing dot of light moves into our field of vision. Is it a jellyfish, or some other unknown animal? Nope. It’s ALVIN, dropping even further towards the center of the earth. It isn’t until this scene that the viewers realize that there is a second vessel filming ALVIN, and seeing the ship dwarfed by the 10,000 foot high ridge is surprising and powerful. As cliched as it sounds, it really does make you realize how insignificant we humans are in the rich history of our planet.

At the end of the movie, we finally come back to Roma’s honeycomb stamp fossil. Near a dead volcano in the Atlantic, ALVIN sees the same pattern repeated over and over on the sea floor. If the creature still exists it traces its roots back longer than
any other animal currently alive, and the scientist on this expedition keenly hoped to find it. Unfortunately, they found nothing, robbing the movie of a potentially thrilling moment, leaving me with an unsettled feeling of incompleteness at the end of the film.

Volcanoes of the Deep Sea is the type of movie well-suited to the biggest of the big screens, in the best tradition of modern IMAX movies. It’s not oversimplified as they sometimes are, satisfied just to string a bunch of cool images together for slack-jawed kids on field trips who will be impressed no matter what. But with such great visual material, I had hoped for more quick-moving “money shots," the heart-stopping footage that makes you inadvertently grip your arm rest. I want to see ALVIN plunge head-first into the murky chasm between the tectonic plates or rush into the billowing smoke. In fairness, that may not be physically possible with the vehicle, but oh would it be thrilling!

Those are the best memories of my own middle-school field trips--the intoxicating rush of nausea as I whizzed down a mountain from the viewpoint of a competitive skier will forever be one of my favorite cinematic moments. But the compelling stories in Volcanoes of the Deep Sea - the hunt for mysterious ancient creatures, bacteria that thrive on poison and active underwater volcanoes - are both visually and intellectually pleasing. This movie may not give you an adrenaline rush, but it is filled with amazing images from parts of the Earth you’ll otherwise never explore.