Chasing Coral (2017)

Film: Chasing Coral (2017)
Director: Jeff Orlowski
Oscar History: No nominations
Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

Environmental documentaries at this point follow a routine pattern.  Unless they're narrated by David Attenborough, they will proceed with the same formula of the earth being in a rough spot, the environment dying either due to climate change or corporate/political antipathy or occasionally just downright greed, and then we are met with a message to go out and start fighting if you want this beautiful world to continue.  No one makes a documentary about Siberian Tigers and in the end we find out that all of the tigers are safe and we don't have to worry about them anymore.  In particular with Chasing Coral, as we see a magical underwater kingdom taken down by an increasingly warm planet, this formula is capitalized, though I will admit it isn't quite as fascinating as it probably could be, and in no way comes close to the majesty of Orlowski's sister documentary to this movie, Chasing Ice.

The film is centered upon the bleaching events that have taken place in coral reefs across the planet, due almost exclusively to the warming of the oceans (as a result of climate change).  The film follows a team of scientists as they wish to photo-document the changes that occur over time in reefs across the planet, showing the destruction of ecosystems that hundreds of species are dependent upon for survival.  It is a harrowing film, and difficult to digest.  Watching such destruction, such quick destruction, reminds me of my research on the saiga antelope, a beautiful creature native to Mongolia that is being wiped out in staggeringly quick time due almost exclusively to an epizootic that has killed off over half the species in the past decade (they're so cute and special, it literally gets me to cry every time someone mentions it...like I'm actually crying right now as I go down a Google wormhole trying to find hope for them and part of me wants to just jump on a plane and feed every saiga antelope I can find medicine).  Suffice it to say, it's hard to watch, and will get you extremely emotional, and for the love of god do not bring up the saiga antelope to me unless you want a five-minute conversation of me gushing and then breathlessly wondering "what do we do?"

"What do we do?" is a question that hangs so ferociously around Chasing Coral, but feels like a coda onto the film.  The movie spends very little on the call-to-action moments of the picture, perhaps an indication that this is so critical the filmmakers have given up hope, though one has to believe that's not true if they went to all of this trouble to document the picture.  Whereas Chasing Ice set off a movement because it showed in gargantuan photos the depleting ice shelves and wanting to make environmental warriors out of you, Chasing Coral feels like the kind of movie that will make you want to curl up under a blanket and start tweeting every Republican in Congress photos of these depleted coral habitats, with "I told you so" rather than "please help."  It doesn't have the same sense of purpose, and its goals are too loose.  It's also, and I hate to say this about a film that has such an important subject matter (a struggle I always hit when it comes to documentaries), kind of dull.  Watching the coral deplete is tragic, and heartbreaking, but the talking head interviews feel pretty rote and the plot of the film, particularly when inevitably a camera breaks or some obstacle is overcome, is standard-fare.

All-in-all, the only thing to recommend this film, other than as an introduction to climate change (it'd be a good one to show relatives who are not seeing the dire straights of their SVU's or support of the coal industry over Christmas) is the photography, both breathtaking and tragic.  Watching these walls of color and life depleted before your eyes is a sobering experience, knowing how difficult it will be to ever regain such creations.  Humanity has a love-hate relationship with nature, destroying it for our own pleasures, but always in awe of its majesty.  Watching this, knowing its permanence, it's hard to imagine how cruelly history will judge this generation, knowing that it all happened on our watch.  The film tags onto its last five minutes a standard-issue "this is how we fix it," but it doesn't feel organic, either because this is a problem so huge it'll take a miracle to reverse or because the filmmakers assume the audience knows what to do with the feelings of inadequacy provided in the picture.  Either way, it feels like a failed experiment, a horror movie with an ambiguous but dour ending.