Undersea eruption
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...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 - ...