Rating: 7.4
Aliens of the Deep (2005)
Buena Vista Pictures

Description

Take a once-in-a-lifetime journey with Academy Award-winning director James Cameron (Best Director, Titanic, 1997) in Aliens of the Deep, and make contact with another world. This incredible underwater adventure gives you extraordinary glimpses of unbelievable creatures that live in an alien world in the deepest depths of the sea. Could these alien life forms be clues to life in outer space? It's an exciting exploration you'll not soon forget.

Tags

Deep sea


Collected reviews and ratings

10 digitallyobsessed.com | Nate Meyers

The world is filled with beauty, enchantment, and unexplainable phenomenon. Strip Aliens of the Deep of its human rationalizations and it just about perfectly captures that.
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9.2 Entertainment Weekly | Lisa Schwarzbaum

But gorgeous as the underwater life-forms are, the excitement of Aliens of the Deep comes from that most old-school, low-tech of elements: real human beings. It turns out that Cameron's canniest move was to assemble a notably attractive, articulate cast of young marine biologists and NASA researchers to accompany him down below.
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9.0 New York Times | Stephen Holden

Filmed in IMAX-3D, this 48-minute film is a visual adventure worthy of that much degraded adjective, awesome. And when the movie is observing the ocean floor where lava from the Earth's inner core is leaking into the water, the strangeness and beauty of an autonomous, teeming ecosystem that has probably existed for two billion years matches any science fiction you could conjure.
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7.5 Chicago Sun-Times | Roger Ebert

"Aliens of the Deep" is not a scientific documentary so much as a journey to an alien world, and basically what we want to do is peer out the portholes along with the explorers.
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7.0 filmcritic.com | Annette Cardwell

But while you’re likely to be grateful for Cameron capturing this incredible footage, it won't take long for you to tire of his constant chatter, narrating nearly every minute of the film with his inane “That’s the most amazing thing ever”-isms. James, just shut up!
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7.0 DVD Town | Josh Lambert

This film is probably the best documentary movie I've seen to date. Directed by James Cameron and Steven Quale, "Aliens of the Deep" is a documentary of a deep-sea diving expedition headed up by James Cameron, Russian scientist Dr. Anatoly Sagalevitch, and a few marine biologists, astrobiologists, and space researchers. The amount of enthusiasm shown by the scientists, Cameron, and the crews was nothing short of children let loose at a "Toys R Us" store.
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6.3 TV Guide | Maitland McDonagh

In the end, you have to give Cameron points for putting his financial muscle behind scientific expeditions rather than, say, lavish parties - sure, he wanted to tag along, but explorers have always benefited from the enthusiasms of gentleman adventurers with deep pockets.
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6.0 BBC | Paul Arendt

Cameron works hard to instill a sense of awe, but despite hushed voice-overs and orchestral harmonies, the film feels basically like someone waving a fish in your face.
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6.0 Variety | Ronnie Scheib

Documentary's visual wonders and well-pitched enthusiasm happily outstrip its clunkily ingenuous ain't-science-fun narrative.
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6.0 Amazon user reviews

The main problem with this film is the limited amount of time we actually get to spend exploring the ocean's depths. Far too much time is taken up getting to know the explorers and hearing their speculations on life on other planets.
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