| 8+ [foreign-language voiceover]Cautions: some animal violence
[known-language voiceover]For: strong promotion of evolution, and humanism
Oceans is one of the grandest film testimonies to the majesty and mystery of God’s craftsmanship, and is unfortunately also a film that went out of its way to persuade people to worship the creature rather than the Creator. However, for viewers who are not fluent in at least one of Oceans’ alternative languages (French and Spanish), the movie’s one artistic flaw—its lack of significant narration—becomes an opportunity to bypass the filmmakers’ unbiblical preaching and free Oceans’ beautiful imagery and haunting music to glorify God.
2009 | Jacques Perrin, Jacques Cluzaud | 84 min Watch Trailer
Foreign-language voiceover:
Some Animal Violence
Sharks and whales hunt and feed on other creatures.
Odd-looking sea creatures may alarm some young children.
Known-language voiceover:
Strong Promotion of Evolution
Oceans is filled from beginning to end with strong references to evolution, not attempting to be informative, but to be persuasive. The evolution references are put in beautiful, poetic terms, and recited with a suave, sophisticated confidence that, for example, “if you take a step back, it’s easy to see how life itself began: in a pulse of water, in a splash of sunlight, and color. A little at a time, new forms of life came rippling and multiplying, adapting and evolving.”
Oceans also, for example, claims that the study of animals “may shed some new light on how our universe came to be,” clearly implying a naturalistic origin of the universe, and attempting to suppress the truth by claiming that there is insufficient evidence in creation to reveal the Creator to them.1
Evolutionary transformations, processes and “ancestors” are presupposed, and then described.
Nature is treated like an active, conscious force.
“Billions of years” are presupposed.
Humanism
The ultimate message of Oceans is that all members of the human race are god, and that in some strange way we share our deity with the ocean. These two forces are depicted as equally at one another’s mercy, and at the same time fiercely interdependent. Humanity, however, is presented as the force with the conscience and therefore with the greater responsibility. It is said that “human indifference is surely the Ocean’s greatest threat.”
In Oceans, humans are described as the pivot upon which the balance of the entire universe rests, and to humanity is ascribed the authority and ability to choose which way it will slide. Nature’s problems are not attributed to human sin in Adam at almost the very beginning of creation, but to recent, collective human behaviors, “in the span of [our] lifetime”.
1 See Romans 1:18-20
