James Cameron: Aliens of the Deep (2005)

Aliens of the Deep, the third underwater documentary that James Cameron made in the 2000s, in many ways functions as his bridge to Avatar. Like its predecessors, 2003’s Ghosts of the Abyss and the 2002 Discovery Channel doc, Expedition: Bismarck, Aliens of the Deep involves the Russian deep sea exploration vessel Akademik Mstislav Keldysh (which was also the setting of the present day sequences in Titanic). We once again get to see that vessel's submersibles, Mir 1 and Mir 2, as well as one of the ROVs, a “remotely operated vehicle” named “Jake,” featured in the other documentaries. As another deep sea documentary, Aliens of the Deep feels of a piece with those other two films, but it isn’t just a third installment. It’s unique in several ways. 

Instead of exploring the sunken wreck of a famous ship, in Aliens of the Deep Cameron and his companions set out on two separate missions, one to the Mid-Ocean Ridges of the Atlantic and then another to those of the Pacific Ocean to showcase the strange life that exists in the hostile environments of these formations. The change in subject matter doesn’t mean that there isn’t a central question or mystery for the filmmaker to probe. The question that the film asks, in which Cameron telegraphs what the next step of his filmmaking will be is this: what can these strange underwater creatures and their unusual natures tell us about what life might look like elsewhere in the universe? 

Thus, the title of the film, Aliens of the Deep, isn’t just playing with the word “alien” to describe the bizarre nature of these “extremophiles,” which is what scientists call creatures or organisms that are able to thrive in extreme environments hostile to humans (and most other organisms). The title is suggesting that these organisms might point us toward imagining what life might look like out there on other planets in environments very different from Earth, such as the icy oceans of Jupiter’s moon Europa. And thus, rather than simply looking inward, as Cameron says, the film is very much looking outward to space, the universe, and humanity’s place in it. As he notes early in the film, sporting his trademark Fox Racing shirt:

I’m Jim Cameron, and here’s the deal. I love this stuff. Exploration. Real honest-to-God deep sea exploration. This is way more exciting than any made up Hollywood special effects. These deep ocean explorations always seem like space missions to me. So why not combine outer space and inner space. 

Because of its dual focus, Aliens of the Deep doesn’t just feature marine biologists, like Dijanna Figueroa, a PhD student at UC Santa Barbara, who is one of the film’s several narrators. It brings in astrobiologists and planetary scientists like Kevin Hand of Stanford, who is also a member of SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence: the group most sci-fi film fans will remember from Robert Zemeckis’s 1997 adaptation of Carl Sagan’s Contact. Cameron invites real astronauts, including Dr. Meghan McArthur, to participate in the exploration. Its expanded focus makes Aliens of the Deep a more wide-ranging, and perhaps less focused, documentary than the ones that came before, but the questions it raises are definitely intriguing.

The film’s wide focus is immediately clear with the beginning: a voiceover (by Figueroa) explaining how all life relies on the sun for energy. This is overlaid on some shots of nature and bustling, timelapse shots of cities. It’s fairly typical science documentary type of stuff, scored to an instrumental version of Madonna’s “Ray of Light.” The film quickly transitions to Figueroa with Cameron on a mission in a submersible exploring the animals that live on the edge of what Cameron calls the “photosynthesis zone.” This brief intro sets up the mission that Figueroa and others will accompany Cameron on.

At this point, the film starts to gather the key figures for the deep-sea mission. It’s a classic establishing narrative, common in these kinds of documentaries. The team is brought together to accomplish this dangerous mission to the bottom of the ocean with a significantly expanded mission scope—40 dives at 10 sites—necessitating more vehicles: two ships, adding the Ares in addition to the Keldysh, and four manned submersibles, the two Mir craft and two bubble-domed Rovers with 320º views. The goal is to coordinate a dive with all four submersibles at the same time, using both ships. It’s big, it’s daring. It fits Jim Cameron. He also brings along both of his brothers. Mike Cameron accompanied the crew of the dives to the Bismarck and Titanic, as the designer and operator of “Elwood” and “Jake,” the ROVs used in those expeditions. “Jake” appears again in Aliens of the Deep. But the third Cameron brother J.D. joins as well, taking on the role of the safety and communications officer for the mission. The film spends some time showing how so many things can go wrong, which offers some natural suspense and drama.

Cameron shows himself a natural leader, coordinating with the various teams and overseeing the top level conception of the whole thing. As he explains, good planning cannot eliminate all risk, but taking care of the details means that when that one-in-ten thing inevitably fails, you never have to worry about those other nine things that you did take care of.

Cameron seems genuinely excited by these missions. There’s a strong sense that despite the film being artistically much more conventional than Cameron’s fiction features, the subject matter is just as—or even more—exciting to him. But Aliens of the Deep is definitely more of a technical mixed bag. Obviously, given that Cameron himself goes down in the submersibles and spends a good amount of time on camera, it makes sense that the film has a co-director Steven Quale, who had served as Cameron’s second unit director on Titanic. Quale is obviously a person Cameron is comfortable entrusting that work to and it would be unfair to suggest the film’s more pedestrian style is his input. Rather, I think that the goal is to be accessible. The film is a 3D IMAX production, more of a piece with the kinds of scientific films that made up the bulk of the early IMAX productions—until the late 90s, all IMAX films were documentaries. Aliens of the Deep is the kind of film you might have encountered on a school trip to a science centre as a child.

Aliens of the Deep is more of a conventional documentary in other ways as well. It plays up the drama in several points, such as when the A-frame of the Ares breaks, necessitating the creation of a jury-rigged pulley system to help get the submersibles into the water. It’s more quick paced and covers more ground. It utilizes more upbeat and popular music to track its drama (at one point AC/DC’s “Back In Black” plays while the crew cuts part of the hull apart with welding torches to facilitate getting the Rovers into the water).

But the real drama of Aliens of the Deep begins once the first four submersibles begin their dive and the audience is taken beneath the waves to see the geological formations and creatures of the depths. Cameron notes early in the film that the change of subject matter in this film, away from shipwrecks to nature, was suggested by the Captain of the Keldysh, Dr. Anatoly Sagalevitch. As Cameron recounts, “Sometime around the middle of Bismarck Anatoly says ‘These wrecks are good, they’re interesting. But you have to do something real… you have to do some science. Something real.’” Ironically, once some of these creatures are seen, the images seem unreal. It’s hard to fathom how some of the translucent jellies that live at these depths even function. They are truly alien.

Cameron notes that when you make these dives to explore, you do not know what you’re going to encounter. You have to be prepared to expect the unexpected. One such thing is the colossal squid, nearly the size of the submersibles themselves, who appears out of the dark. Another is the adorable “Dumbo” octopus, a little guy with small elephant-like ear flaps that seem to “fly” him through the water.

Aliens of the Deep spends the bulk of its time sharing images of not only these fascinating creatures, but the geology of the Mid-Ocean Ridges. Seismology and geology are also forces that demand exploration. These ridges exist at the bottom of both the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans, where the tectonic plates are being expanded and split in the middle via the powerful forces of the Earth’s core. Lava pours out, hardening into obsidian rock instantly as it’s cooled by the water. The later missions involve the Mirs going to explore deep ocean vents, where superheated water that cannot boil due to the pressure of the ocean becomes what looks like black underwater smoke. But in reality, each column of black smoke emerging from rock chimneys is “a blowtorch of superheated water.” In navigating around them, the operators constantly remind the viewer that the heat could potentially cut through the vessel’s walls and windows like a knife. Even using “Jake” to go in close to the vents and get samples raises the potential for damage. Mike Cameron has to repair “Jake” when they return to the ship, since the heat has damaged the little ROV.

And yet, despite the extreme, metal-melting heat, shrimp and other creatures live around the vents. These thermal rock vents are a prime example of how life here on Earth can not only survive in extreme environments, but thrive. The creatures and microbes that live around the vents use the heat of the Earth’s core to fuel themselves and draw heat. Unlike nearly all the other creatures on earth, these ones don’t need photosynthesis at some point in the food chain to survive, rather relying on a chemosynthesis to derive the energy for life. The shrimp are dancing in and out of the smoke, as if they’re having a grand time. As Cameron notes at one point: “That party’s been going on down there in the dark for the last billion years, and it’s going to be going on for the next billion years. They’re just doing their thing. It has nothing to do with us. The Sun could go out tomorrow and they wouldn’t know, and they wouldn’t care.”

While Aliens of the Deep offers images of the alien worlds and environments that exist on our own planet, it explicitly connects this to the potential existence of life elsewhere than Earth. Cameron pivots from exploring the ocean floor to explaining some of the theories about the connection between water and life. On Earth, as they explain, wherever there is water, even in the extreme environments of these underwater smoke vents with toxic mineral contents, there is life! How can this be?

This offers Cameron a chance to explain the Drake Equation. This theory by Dr. Frank Drake offers a conceptual framework with which to think about how much life may exist in the universe. It considers the number of stars with planets that have liquid water and how many of those likely develop tool-using, self-aware creatures. The main point being, if water is common, then life may be common. Of course, Cameron also considers the concept of the “Great Filter'', the idea that even if life is common the explanation for why we haven’t seen it is that perhaps intelligent life has a tendency toward self-destruction before it can communicate across the stars. This tendency toward destruction is something that Cameron has explored in many of his films, from The Terminator to Avatar. 

Cameron speculates about the places that water exists or formerly existed in our own Solar System, such as Mars or Europa, one of Jupiter’s moons which is covered by a 10km thick layer of ice over a liquid water ocean that covers the entire planet! One of the film’s final images offers a CGI imagining of NASA scientists descending beneath Europa’s ocean to find an intelligent species and their civilization, very similar to the ones portrayed in Cameron’s own film, The Abyss. In this way, Aliens of the Deep continues Cameron’s auteur touches and is interesting for how it shows the continuity of his thematic interests across his whole filmography, even in his documentaries. These interests emerge not just from theory or or even accidentally, but out of Cameron’s actual actions.

In considering the link between exploring the ocean and exploring space, Cameron asks some of the scientific participants: “Put up your hand if you would sacrifice 10 years of your life to go to Mars?” All of the scientists say they would. But then they also talk a bit more about the consequences of that choice. Dijanna Figueroa says that she raised her hand without thinking of the consequences of such a choice to leave behind her husband or cat. It’s unstated, but the cat might not survive until you can return from such a trip. But she believes her husband would encourage her, because we “all have that exploration bug” in us. James Cameron does too. He’s always searching and trying to find something new and fascinating.

In this way, with Aliens of the Deep Cameron is laying the groundwork for the actual concept of Avatar. In Avatar, as around the thermal vents at the bottom of the ocean, we have an extreme environment, toxic to humans, where we must use ROVs for access and sacrifice huge amounts of time to explore (one of the seismologists comments on how she had to leave behind her five month old baby). In Avatar, the avatar bodies that allow Jake Sully and the other human scientists to explore Pandora are a kind of biological ROV, and likewise the life that the humans find is truly astounding.

Watching Aliens of the Deep reinforces the fact that Cameron is ultimately a hopeful person, who for all his warnings about technology in films like The Terminator or Titanic is also optimistic about the possibility of using it to explore and discover new things that will deepen our appreciation of life. And I enjoyed watching Aliens of the Deep simply for the parts that deepened my appreciation of the variety and tenacity of life on this planet. Life exists almost everywhere, and in forms that even I can hardly imagine. As Cameron comments about one of the real deep sea creatures he observes, “If these animals didn’t exist we couldn’t imagine them.” Reality exceeds our imagination.

After Aliens of the Deep, Cameron would begin working on Avatar. I noted above how the concepts of that later science fiction film build on and address some of the questions and concepts explored in this science documentary. In that film, Cameron imagines tree lizards who launch spiral-shaped gliders upon leaping from branches of bioluminescent forests and six-legged steeds. It’s a world of high imagination, but ultimately the images all point back at Earth, which is appropriate given what Cameron is trying to say with that film. By going out into the universe, not only do we discover something for the sake of itself, but we discover what it tells us of life here on Earth and its preciousness and unending surprise.

7 out of 10

Aliens of the Deep (2005, USA)

Directed by James Cameron & Steven Quale.

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