Quartile rating: 6/10 · 1 rating
Atlantis is filmmaker Luc Besson's celebration of the beauty and wonder of the world beneath the sea, expanding upon themes touched on in his film The Big Blue. Combining stunning underwater cinematography and a hypnotic score by Eric Serra, Besson's singular vision defies dialogue or narrative structure to explore ocean life as you've never seen it before. Following the colossal success of The Big Blue, Luc Besson crisscrossed the world's seas and oceans to film the beauty and diversity of marine life: from the giant octopuses of Vancouver to the manta rays of the Pacific (New Caledonia), and the grey sharks of Tahiti. A film with no actors or sets other than the underwater world. A breathtaking view of marine species: sharks, dolphins, manatees, octopuses. An exploration of the seabed in the Bahamas, the Galapagos, Vancouver, and Tahiti.
Atlantis is essentially a visual poem with no plot or actors — Plot and Acting are not applicable in any meaningful sense and score at the floor. The underwater cinematography is the film's entire raison d'être and is genuinely stunning, earning a 4; Besson and his team captured marine life with extraordinary artistry. Novelty sits at 3 — while the no-dialogue, pure-imagery approach is distinctive, the nature documentary without narration was not entirely unprecedented, and the film occupies a comfortable niche between art film and wildlife documentary without fully transcending either. The ending drifts rather than resolves, a mild weakness in an already structureless film.