Volcanoes of the Deep Sea

With its spooky, otherworldly rock formations, its unimaginably bizarre creatures and its mysterious remoteness from ordinary life, the deep ocean holds all the makings of a genuinely magical science film. "Volcanoes of the Deep Sea" throws some spectacular and previously unseen images onto the giant IMAX screen, but it stitches them together with a sometimes confusing narrative that only distracts from the fascinating undersea world.

We begin on an unnamed coastline, with an unnamed man. Only much later do we learn that the coast is Spain's and that the man is a paleontologist named Dolf Seilacher. For the moment, he's some guy chipping at some rocks and talking about the "mistress" he acquired here on his honeymoon.

That mistress would be a small, elusive creature called Paleodictyon nodosum, whose fossilized tunnels Seilacher discovered half a century ago. Remarkably, he believes that the prehistoric creature, which he thinks is a kind of worm, still exists; geologist Peter Rona has found similar hexagonal patterns of tunnels on the deep ocean floor.

So off we go into the deep, in search of Paleodictyon. But first we get some back story: about Alvin, the famous submersible the scientists will use; about the mid-ocean vents that an Alvin team discovered in the Pacific three decades ago; about volcanic eruptions underwater and how and why they occur; about the many weird creatures that live near these "volcanoes," properly known as hydrothermal vents; about the connections between this deep-sea life and deep space. It's all nicely narrated by Ed Harris, but it derails the narrative about the elusive living fossil.

Perhaps, though, director Stephen Low would have been wiser to go even further off the rails. For when we do finally get back to Seilacher, as he and Rona eagerly slice open cores of sediment to look for Paleodictyon, disappointment awaits. They find the tunnels, but not the creatures.

Science is like that sometimes. But the failure to find a living creature makes the decision to focus the film on the search for it an odd one.

Maybe they thought it would diminish the magic if they told us such things. But the magic of science, as this film's best moments remind us, lies precisely in knowing what's real.