Can oceanic movies shift our land bias?

Currently, the oceans are making waves in popular culture. The oceans are prominently featured in a variety of recent blockbusters, including James Wan's "Aquaman" in 2018, its forthcoming  sequel "Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom," Ryan Coogler's "Black Panther: Wakanda Forever" and most recently, James Cameron's "Avatar: The Way of Water." In all these films, the oceans are not simply backgrounds, nondescript settings, nor flat surfaces. Rather, in each of these blockbusters, the oceans are presented as complex ecologies of depth that merit serious and sustained attention.

The immersive experience of oceans in a blockbuster movie can perhaps turn audiences into budding ocean activists.

All these movies can be understood as part of an emerging field called the blue humanities, which studies the relationship between humans and oceans. It's an urgent field of study because the oceans are becoming vast and deep graveyards due to a variety of interconnected, human-created conditions including, but not limited to, industrialized fishing, acidification, warming, sea-level rise and pollution. By 2050, the U.N. predicts there will be more plastic in the ocean than fish, and throughout the oceans, dead zones are growing and spreading.