Top 5 movies for scuba divers

[Griddable]

According to IMDB, the movie was "inspired by the lives of Jacques Mayol and Enzo Maiorca," two real-life competitive divers. Perhaps that makes the characters more plausible?

Like how Nordwand was "inspired" by an ill-fated attempt to scale the Eiger, I suppose.

I didn't read up Grand Blue before I made my earlier comment, that was just my reaction immediately after watching it. Knowing it was based on real people doesn't really make the characters any more believable, especially after reading about Mayol's life, which is pretty different from what we see in the film, though it's worth noting that he helped write the screenplay. Perhaps it was the depiction of the characters I took as implausible, or the way the story was presented. It was long and plodding and I found it far less interesting and more time-consuming than reading up on the real Mayol, who made several contributions to freediving that were barely touched on by the film.

Downloading a few others mentioned here, hoping to have more luck. The documentary recommendations are all great, with some amazing footage!

 

[Lead_carrier]

As for that 'well covered' photo of the young lady diver earlier in this thread... I am kinda new to vintage dive gear, how did she manage buoyancy control? Are there some devices I'm not seeing?

Nope, you pretty much see all the bouyancy control devices right up front. Now of course when I asked if I could check out the the bouyancy control devices, I got slapped so hard I couldn't hold a reg in my mouth for a week.

 

[divingtpapa]

I will add my votes for Finding Nemo, and Men of Honor.

 

[TV Mark]

Hard hat diving plus underwater living dead equals "Zombies of Mora Tau".

 

[kkfok]

1. South Pacific (Wild Pacific)
2. Into the blue
3. Kingdom of the Oceans
4. Nature's great events - The Great Tide
5. Disneynature - Oceans

 

[ScubaStan81]

Aliens of the Deep us a great doco. Not about scuba but diving related with Janes Cameron.

 

[ElChe]

I love The Deep. A really great movie, but certainly it's not a documentary... There are several fairly typical treasure hunting movies, basically the plots are very similar, like The Deep, the Underwater!, the Into the Blue, the Wet Gold, etc. For me all of them are enjoyable if the leading actress pretty enough (J. Bissett, Jane Russell, Jessica Alba, Brooke Shields- nice team, isn't it?)
I collected a lot of underwater shark or sea monster movies, sadly in most of these the divers are the first casulties. (By the way, I recently wrote a short article about shark movies, there are few really extraordinary ones.) I don't think these would make diving attracting for anyone. I use to watch a lot of documentaries, but... I confess there are more and more similar ones which looks like a reality show. The divers always face danger, there are debates in the team, etc. For me the works of the real pioneer, Hans Hass is a milestone- I saw the Pirsch Unter Wasser (1942) many years ago and it's still one of my favorites.

 

[CT-Rich]

It's tough to answer a serious question about that photo, but I know that your question is serious, so I'll try.

In the photo, she's not wearing a wetsuit or drysuit, so there's no need to "compensate" for the compression of a suit. The only change in bouyancy that she'd experience during a dive is the difference in bouyancy between a full tank and an empty tank... About 5 pounds, assuming that she's diving an old 72 cuft tank.

...And 5 pounds is very easy to compensate for using your lungs.

In short, the "norm" for divers of that era was to weight themselves correctly from the outset and do any slight compensation with their lungs... So no BCD was actually necessary.

Actually, when BCDs did come onto the scene a few years later, they were often seen as a crutch that created poor form. In many circles, that's totally correct - there's a lot that can be learned from diving without a BCD.

Interestingly, today's top-of-the-line backplates and wings differ very little from the AT Pak that she's wearing - if you were to build the AT Pak out of metal (instead of plastic like she's wearing) and sandwich a bladder between the pack and the tank... You'd have a modern backplate and wing.

Fascinating how things come back around, isn't it?

BCD were pretty standard back then, Mostly horse collar style with oral inflators. By the late seventies, Jacket style BCD with power inflators were widely available. I bought my Seatec in 1982. The choice to not put Ms Bisset in a wetsuit or BCD was purely an artistic choice by the film makers. The tank was at the time the cutting edge of technology, AL 80.


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The Gear she is using is still quite servicable today. As has been pointed out in many threads a capillary depth gauge on the spg and a watch would be plenty of gear to dive with back then with the wreck laying a maximum depth of 85 ft. Most divers assume that you need a lot of gear to dive, but regulators and the basic gear has remained little changed since 1978. More safety gear has been added, octopuses, dive computers and more sofisticated BCDs, but the basics of diving stay the same.

 

[je76]

For me it boils down to 2 movies: The Deep and Creature from the Black Lagoon.

 

[PoseidonsEnforcer]

I just recently watched blue water white death and it was awesome. I had always thought it was a horror movie from the cover, but it's more of a documentary with Rodney Fox, and Valerie and Ron Taylor (some of my heroes). If you love The Life Aquatic you can watch this and see where Wes Anderson got his inspiration from.

There are a few scenes which are a little disturbing when it comes to the treatment of sharks, but it was a different (ignorant) time of shark understanding.