Double Review - Time and My Octopus Teacher

I’ve never talked about documentaries before. Hell, I’ve never been interested in them before, as most of the film circles I exist in don’t tend to discuss documentaries as much as they discuss narrative films. I’ve only seen 3 documentaries in theatres in my life, and caught mere glimpses of others playing on Australian Story or the ABC.

However, more recently, I was encouraged by one of my aunts to watch the Netflix documentary My Octopus Teacher, and I also used my Amazon Prime Trial to watch the movie Time, as it’d been recommended by a YouTuber I watch as part of his honourable mentions of the best films of 2020. So I watched them, and decided to do a double review, in the vein of my old review of Rocketman and Bohemian Rhapsody. Right, here we go.

To introduce these movies, My Octopus Teacher follows the story of Craig Foster, a South African diver who spent a year swimming with an octopus in a kelp forest to study how it works, developing new emotional attachments and understandings along the way. Meanwhile, Time is the story of Fox Rich, who was sent to prison for 12 years while her husband was sentenced to 60 without appeal for armed robbery, and the film explores how this time without her husband has affected her children, family and her life in general.

I’d say the movie I’d be more up for watching if you sprang them on me is My Octopus Teacher, because I’ve always had a thing for aquatic life (including binge-watching River Monsters repeatedly). Time is less appealing to me personally, because I’m always wary of black-and-white films as I think that most filmmakers use the technique less as an artistic tool and more as a marketing crutch. Additionally, it’s rated R18+, which makes me feel the subject matter is going to be ludicrously hard to sit through compared to the G-rated octopus film.

In the end, it was the reverse of that – I think Time is the better of the two for a number of reasons, but I’m going to try and review them both at the same time and point out things simultaneously.

First of all, the visual look of both films is stunning. I’m still apprehensive about black-and-white being used in films, but in Time, it’s justified as the film is mainly made of black-and-white home footage, and the format amplifies the lifeless atmosphere of the upsetting subject matter. Meanwhile, My Octopus Teacher has amazing, colourful underwater photography that’s just pleasing to look at regardless of context.

Both films also have great music and strong sound design, so I can safely say that these are technically competent films which can be at least on in the background to occasionally glance over at. Where they differ in quality is how they tackle their subject matter and the effectiveness of their approaches.

My Octopus Teacher reminds me so much of the feedback I received whenever I turned in a history paper on an unknown subject – the teacher would always tell me to include background information at the start of the piece, because while I may know the information and its quality, they don’t. In the film, the narrator Craig Foster cites his main motivation for exploring the sea outside his home as in response to a breakdown he had.

But the film doesn’t explore this breakdown at all – it doesn’t develop the more therapeutic side of the film for the subject well enough. Additionally, Octopus doesn’t even involve interviews from any other perspective than Fosters – not his son (who is inspired to dive by Foster), his brother (who was there at the breakdown) or his wife (the most knowledgeable about how the octopus shaped Foster). It feels too narrow a perspective to get a properly developed story.

Meanwhile, Time has this problem as well, but to a far lesser extent. Time’s one key failing is that it doesn’t elaborate on the robbery that landed both Rich and her husband in prison – we have no idea how major it was, and if it was a particularly low-impact crime that was treated unfairly, that information would increase the sympathy we give to the subject of Rich.

But Time thankfully offers more than just one perspective – it features interviews with Rich’s sons and mother to help build the story better, and draws in many other bystanders and extras to react to these perspectives to further build the sense of a living world. It feels more interesting than My Octopus Teacher because it’s better at building a sense at why we should be interested, by demonstrating how this one thing could affect people in many different ways, while Octopus merely observes one unflinching view.

Another thing which I feel that Time did much better was to not provide a huge amount of narration. Most of the film is taken up with old home videos of Rich’s life before and after her imprisonment, with most of the devastating storytelling being told with reaction shots and visual detail rather than just being explained. It feels mature, trusting the audience to silently side with these people by not just saying that they’re regular folk, but immersing us in unencumbered innocence.

By comparison, My Octopus Teacher is loaded with a narration by Foster who, while having a pleasant voice and some good things to say, talks way too much. I feel if the narration was removed during the scenes where he’s interacting with the octopus, the scenes would play much more naturally – it would be very WALL-E-esque, touching and funny to watch this bizarre creature show human emotion. Instead, it comes off more sterile and didactic, odd for a documentary about life and freedom.

One more thing in Time’s favour is that it doesn’t try and preach a message to the audience – it’s not a message film, but a character study. We’re not meant to write our anti-prison billboards with Rich, but to understand the devastation of separation and sympathise with her. That’s where I feel a lot of critics and audiences are getting it wrong – they see it as an anti-imprisonment movie, where really, it’s about the strength of human devotion. I admire it more for that than My Octopus Teacher, which doesn’t quite have the same level of character depth or message within it as Time.

Ultimately, Time is a very good documentary that I would recommend that you see, while My Octopus Teacher is more one to have in the background to glance at for nature shots every now and then. They’re on Amazon Prime and Netflix respectively for free, so go ahead and get them on a free trial if you can.

Time gets an A-.

My Octopus Teacher gets a B-.

What did you guys think of these films if you saw them? Leave your answers in the comments below.