The North Sea has a reputation problem. Cold, grey, commercially exploited, largely ignored by wildlife documentary commissioners in favour of the Great Barrier Reef or the Galápagos. Peter van Rodijnen has spent years diving it anyway, and North Sea, Nature Untamed is essentially the argument that everyone wrote it off too soon. Van Rodijnen is not David Attenborough. He's a Dutch diver with a camera and an enthusiasm that borders on infectious obsession, and his voiceover has the slightly eccentric quality of someone who genuinely cannot believe other people aren't as excited about shorthorn sculpin fish as he is. That personality gap — between blue-chip BBC production values and this more personal, handmade feel — is both the film's limitation and its charm. The footage itself is legitimately stunning in places. Bioluminescent algae turning grey waves into something resembling a cosmic light show. A school of mackerel executing synchronised formations that put Olympic swimming to shame. A basking shark filmed off Scotland, mouth open, feeding on plankton — 'the big friendly giant of the seas' — that earns its jaw-drop fair and square. Van Rodijnen's patience as an underwater cinematographer is the film's real asset; he clearly waited a long time for some of these shots. The film follows nature documentary conventions closely enough that its structural beats are entirely predictable: wonder, more wonder, ecological crisis, cautious hope. Puffin breeding colonies in Scotland are down 30% due to overfishing — that's the crisis beat. The Atlantic bluefin tuna, absent from the North Sea since the 1960s, has returned and can grow heavier than a grand piano — that's the hope beat. The film doesn't interrogate these facts so much as present them as emotional punctuation marks in a sequence of beautiful images. What it lacks is the analytical depth or narrative ambition that would make it more than a very good natural history segment stretched to feature length. Van Rodijnen's barnacle-with-a-superlong-penis aside (a genuinely funny moment of biological absurdism) the film doesn't take many risks. It is exactly what it says on the tin: stunning footage from an underfilmed body of water, delivered with warmth and without pretension. For audiences who feel the North Sea has been unfairly overlooked, that's enough.
