Chris Knight: Before Aquaman there was ‘Aquarela’, the epic of water

Please be aware that this documentary from Russian filmmaker Victor Kossakovsky is not a new superhero movie about Aquaman’s cousin. Though it does feature a protagonist with incredible strength and shape-shifting powers. The subject of the film is water, the liquid abundance of which makes Earth a rarity in the solar system.

Actually, Ice-rela might be a more appropriate title, since the film kicks off in Lake Baikal, Siberia, which is frozen for much of the year. We witness a hardy team of Russians chopping their way through the soft ice to drag a sunken car to the surface. But just as they seem to have a hold on it and are remarking that the damage doesn’t look so bad, another vehicle goes tearing past and then – ploompf! – disappears though the ice.

Kossakovsky provides no narration, other than subtitles for the odd bit of Russian spoken by the rescuers. He is intent merely on observing the frightening powers of water, which also involves a trip to Greenland to watch calving glaciers shed skyscraper-sized hunks of ice, and a drive through the deserted streets of Miami during Hurricane Irma.

Aquarela was shot at 96 frames per second and features a Dolby Atmos Sound score by Finland’s Eicca Toppinen, who plays cello in a heavy metal band. This may explain why the tracks switch between stuff that sounds like Metallica, and what seems to be orchestral arrangements of whale music. It’s eerily fitting accompaniment to the supernatural scenes playing out on the screen.

Yet for all its majesty, Aquarela left me a little, well, cold. Perhaps it’s the length of the scenes, which go on for tens of minutes with little variation in imagery. And after the car-rescue plot of the opening, I was prepared for more mildly plot-driven segments, not the aquatic equivalent of cloud gazing. I came for a short story and got a free-verse poem.Aquarela is still beautiful, though I dare say you could chop it into its constituent parts and run them in loops in a gallery setting.

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