When a 40-minute documentary starts off with several minutes of opening credits instead of jumping right into the subject matter, you know you're dealing with some serious fluff. As Dolphins proceeds, that initial impression proves to be correct. This IMAX film takes a few fascinating nuggets of information and some great dolphin footage and completely fails to build on those elements to make a solid overall film.

Part of the problem is that Dolphins never settles on a coherent structure. The film wanders from topic to topic, touching on elements like dolphin intelligence, their powerful swimming ability, underwater communication, and feeding behavior, but never really providing any solid information about any of these topics. In fact, many times a statement is made that really needs some sort of follow-up (like the absurd claim that dolphin swimming "breaks the laws of physics") but the narration simply leaves it and moves on to the next unrelated scene.

I'm not impressed with the scientist the filmmakers chose to work with, either. Kathleen Dudzinski doesn't seem to have much of an organized plan of study, other than "swim with the dolphins and see what they do." Nor are her conclusions particularly sound. Most notably, she observes the vocalization patterns of one species of dolphin in clear, high-visibility waters and of another species in cloudier, low-visibility water, and concludes that the difference in vocalization habits is due to the water clarity... with no consideration of the fact that they're two different species. It's entirely possible that we're getting a misrepresentation of Dudzinski's work, but if that's the case then Dolphins is even more flawed for dumbing-down the science.

In the end, Dolphins comes off as silly and pretentious, trying to add an additional sense of import and grandeur to material that ought to have been left to impress the viewer on its own merits. Certainly the footage of dolphins is good enough to do that, when we get to actually see the dolphins instead of the humans. One frustrating scene shows a class of schoolchildren being shown a video of dolphins surfing: now that's truly captivating material. Unfortunately, though, we only get a brief shot of the dolphins (with the footage only being shown on a small in-scene television) before the camera pans to the kids' reactions. I don't want to see a bunch of kids oohing and aahing over the material, I want to see more of it for myself!

The filmmakers have drawn in some star power for their film, with the narration being provided by Pierce Brosnan and the soundtrack by Sting. What they should have spent more time and money on was making a more content-rich program.

The DVD

Dolphins is a two-DVD set, with both discs in a single-wide keepcase. The first DVD has the full program and special features, and the second DVD has the program in high-definition format, accessible through a PC running Windows XP.

Video

Dolphins offers two viewing choices: a 4:3 version (the original IMAX format) or a 1.85:1 widescreen version that, sadly, is not anamorphically enhanced. The aspect ratio question is a bit sticky, though. Based on several scene-to-scene comparisons, it seems that the widescreen image has additional information to the sides in some scenes, but in others it's clear that the top and bottom of the image have been cropped. (In one instance there's evidence of cropping to the side of the image as well, for no apparent reason.) Given that the image composition is often rather poor in the 4:3 version, with lots of empty space at the top of the scene, for instance, the widescreen version seems slightly better overall.

The image quality is reasonably good, with colors looking bright and clean and contrast handled well in the few scenes with lower light levels (mostly the underwater shots). Some grain and edge enhancement affects the overall clarity of the image, reducing the overall detail in the picture.

Audio

Your choice of soundtrack for Dolphins depends on which video option you choose. If you choose the widescreen version, you have the option of a DTS 5.1 or a Dolby 5.1 soundtrack. If you choose the 4:3 version, there's no DTS option, but you get a choice of Dolby 5.1 tracks in English, French, and Spanish. Yes, that's the weirdest thing I ever heard of. No, you can't access the other audio options on the fly.

Al this weirdness aside, there's little difference between the DTS and the 5.1 tracks in any case. The DTS 5.1 soundtrack for Dolphins is one of the tamest I've encountered. Even my cat, who normally heads for the hills when anything with surround sound is playing, came out and fell asleep on my lap while I was watching the film. For both this option and the Dolby 5.1 option, the overall sound clarity is satisfactory, but there's minimal use of the surround channels for either overall immersion or specific sound effects. The result is a very center-focused and non-immersive audio experience.

Extras

The main special feature is a 37-minute "Making of" featurette. Given its length, one might hope for something interesting, but let's face it: the makers of Dolphins don't seem to have a good grasp of what's interesting and what's not. There's lots of footage of cameras being lugged around, plenty of clips from the film, and some not-very-insightful interviews. It's not really worth watching. French and Spanish subtitles are included (and the French titles are on by default, though you can turn them off on the fly).

A miscellany of other special features is included, none particularly special. A short "MFF History" segment is a series of clips about other films by the same people. "Dolphins' Books" (their apostrophe, not mine) offers two book recommendations with a photo gallery from each, and a "Marine Science Video" is an 11-minute promotional piece for the film. "Do-It-Yourself Science" is a series of text screens that basically lay out a lesson plan for a student activity involving listening to dolphin sounds on the Internet; the links may be useful for teachers to check out, at least. Finally, we get more text pages on the "Great Adventures Film Series" and "About Greg Macgillivray," and a set of trailers.

The second disc of the set has the complete feature in a high-definition transfer. As there are currently no high-definition DVD players, this version of the film is intended to be played on a PC running the Windows XP operating system.

Final thoughts

Dolphins may be worth a rental for the sake of its dolphin footage; if you tune out the uninformative and at times downright silly narration, there are some nice shots of the dolphins interacting with humans or in the wild. Mainly, though, Dolphins is frustrating because there's so much potential for a captivating and informative program... and it's all wasted here. Rent it.