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Luc Besson's "The Big Blue" inspired a whole generation of freedivers all around the world and still does to this day. Besides its catchy storyline though, how accurate is it when it comes to modern practices in freediving? Here's what Canada's deepest female, Sheena McNally, thinks about it.
I wish there was no love story in it, that was so cheesy! But I have to say, there were parts of it that were quite entertaining, like the beginning of it, and the whole dynamic between Jacques and Enzo, and the character of Enzo is just fantastic! Diving has changed a lot since then though! So, now us doing what we do, we’re diving self-powered, we're not using a sled like in the movie, so we're using our body, or parts of our body, to get to depth and then back up again. In the film, they're riding on a weighted sled and they're riding the sled back up for the most part, which is actually no longer sanctioned in competitions because there were some accidents. This form of freediving was kind of proven over the years to be dangerous because there's equipment and there’s space for human error, and there definitely were errors with equipment and human errors, and there's sort of one high profile story where a woman actually died doing this type of freediving. So nobody will touch it, like, the sanctioning bodies won't touch it any longer.
This is what they're doing in the film, so we watch them do this and it's kind of it's amusing, it’s funny watching them sit on these sleds, and they're hyperventilating super hard, which is like we don't do this, going down or come back up. But I would say, final review of the film? It is very entertaining but not very accurate, in terms of what's done anymore.