Blue Water, White Death

Besides seeing Blue Water, White Death in a theater in 1971, I first saw a preview of segments of this film some months before its premiere at the first Our World Underwater film festival in Chicago. The preview was narrated live by cameraman Stan Waterman and he took questions after the preview. Everyone in attendance was sitting on the edge of their seats, because no one had ever filmed Great White Sharks before.

In today's world of dozens of documentaries on Great White Sharks and Shark Week on the Discovery Channel, the shark footage can seem a little tame. But the significance of this film shouldn't be minimized. At the time this expedition took place, very little was known about Great White Sharks and most experts of the day thought that getting in the water with a Great White was instant death. This film (with its accompanying book, Blue Meridian), were Peter Benchley's inspirations in writing Jaws.

This excellent film would be a worthy addition to any wildlife documentary aficionado's library, if only it were available on VHS or DVD (I'm just glad I taped it off of TV many years ago). With all the retread junk that's being released on DVDs today, why isn't a great film like this available?

Peter Gimbel and his team were the first to introduce me to SHARKS, when I watched this Epic Documentary. Since then, my life has never been the same again.

Sharing this incredible journey in search of the Great White Shark, Gimbel and his team have managed to capture some of the most incredible and memorable Shark Scenes that will live in your memory. i have watched it hundreds of times.

a True Masterpiece!!

Peter Gimbel wrote, produced, and co-directed(with James Lipscomb) this historic documentary film that portrays Gimbel and his team of underwater photographers on their multi-month oceanic journey from South Africa, Madagascar, and finally Dangerous Reef Australia in their brave attempt to find and film great white sharks in their natural habitat that had never been documented before. Film also shows the camaraderie of the crew, and even what they do on their downtime...

Ambitious film has gorgeous underwater photography and effective climatic footage of the great whites, but is marred by a slack pace and too much talk. Still, worthwhile viewing nonetheless.

It's amazing that when this movie was made, no one has ever filmed a great white before. And it's only been about 40 years since this movie was made.

When I first started taking scuba diving lesson, this movie was all the rage of town. There just wasn't any movie that had shark cage in it before this one. I think this was also the first movie to feature "chumming" technique to lure the sharks. My friends were telling me how huge the sharks were. Later I found out that it wasn't so big, but still it's a really big fish. Did Peter Benchley get his idea from this movie when he wrote "JAWS" ?

This was a ground breaking movie that raised the bar on underwater documentary features. In every underwater documentary there's little bit of influence from this movie. It's also amazing how much more we've learned in such a short time since this movie was made, mostly due to ubiquity of underwater filming.

A very important movie historically in the annals of underwater documentaries.

An interesting film and seafaring adventure of an expedition tracking a great white shark through hundreds of miles of open sea spanning three continents. The search finally bears fruit some 83 minutes into the film which has a leisurely pace throughout and captures the feeding frenzy of white tips on whale carcasses, and barracudas also manage to get screen time for several minutes. Peter Gimbel and his crew are frustrated by their failure to spot a great white but finally get lucky at Dangerous Reef on the south coast of Australia. Here, Gimbel is finally rewarded with great footage of the huge fish. Shark cages are used to film the great white that seems more intent on the cage and the divers inside than the bait dangled before it. An Australian diver relates his run-in with a great white in the ocean, detailing his injuries and his miraculous escape. The footage of the underwater sequences throughout the movie is expertly done.