Now streaming on Netflix, the 2020 documentary My Octopus Teacher has much about it to love, although the thin "plot" -- for want of a better word -- is not one of those things. Instead you can almost turn off the sound and simply feast on the glorious and fantastic images of the undersea world, a world few of us know. Teeming with thousands of incredible, wild creatures that could have been drawn by a Disney animator, they spend their lives in a forest of kelp, its fragile leaves waving artfully in the water. It's almost impossible to believe that it's all real. (I was fully expecting to see King Triton, Ariel and Ursula from The Little Mermaid show up any minute.)
The story, on the other hand, is as drab as dishwater and almost boring enough to put you to sleep. (I did nod off a few times.) A burned-out videographer (Craig Foster) takes a year off from his job so he can "be a better father" to his son. He hints at a troubled marriage, and we see his wife in shadow at the beginning, never to be mentioned again. Instead the man, who narrates his own mania while sitting at his kitchen table, recounts a year of his life spent diving underwater at the very same spot every day -- a bay in the Atlantic Ocean near Cape Town, South Africa. There he meets and falls in love with an octopus. Yup, you heard me. Falls in love.
Okay, so the octopus is an amazing creature, we learn. When it loses a limb, it grows a new one, and by the way it has eight of them. It takes on the colors and textures of its environment in a nanosecond, to hide from predators. It can get really big or really small in a flash. On the downside, it lives for just a year so don't get one for a pet. Still, the film makes you want to take up scuba diving right away, just as soon as this damn pandemic ends. Sadly, the man is not amazing. In fact, he's borderline nuts, perhaps over the border. Try to ignore him and see this unusual movie just for its escape value.
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