While The Water Horse: Legend Of The Deep has a lot of shiny CGI
effects and an adorable child ready and waiting to keep the rugrats occupied
for a few hours this Christmas, there's enough psychological and psycho-sexual
stuff going on in the story to keep parents guessing too. For a modern take on Pete's
Dragon by
way of The Secret Of Roan Inish, it's surprisingly dense and meaty. That's a
little surprising, coming from Walden Media—home of such other
squeaky-clean, sincere-but-flat book-to-film adaptations as Bridge To
Terabithia and The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe. But the unblinking,
wholehearted innocence that makes the film work is rapidly becoming a familiar
company signifier.
The story—bookended by modern-day
intervals that place the whole film as a story craggy old Scot Brian Cox is telling
to two wide-eyed tourists—is set in April 1942, when Germans have
"captured Europe" and are only 100 miles from Scotland's shores. This lets
good-hearted but self-important Army captain David Morrissey pretend that
there's some importance to his remote posting on an estate run by housekeeper
Emily Watson, near Scotland's Loch Ness. Meanwhile, Watson's husband went down
with his ship in combat a year ago, but her brooding, aquaphobic young son Alex
Etel still firmly believes he's coming home. Then mysterious new handyman Ben
Chaplin begins threatening Morrissey's operational security and his proprietary
emotions toward Watson. With all this personal and war-related drama going on,
it almost counts as a side plot when Etel finds an unremarkable, vaguely
egg-shaped rock, and—perhaps having seen Eragon—lugs it home.
Whereupon it hatches, producing an adorable "water horse" that behaves like a
friendly puppy, eats like an elephant, and expands like a balloon, kicking off
all sorts of hijinks.
Director Jay Russell (Tuck Everlasting, My Dog Skip) and cinematographer
Oliver Stapleton (The Cider House Rules) steep their charming fairy tale in
gorgeous, stark Scottish coastal vistas, and the CGI is flawlessly integrated.
Solid casting and performances help flesh out the film. But the
story—based on a book by Dick King-Smith, whose children's novels also
spawned Babe—wins the day. Screenwriter Robert Nelson Jacobs can't
resist a few clichés, particularly regarding the colorful, heavily brogued,
comedic locals who hang out down at the local pub, but he dodges many of the
obvious traps and avoids cloying sentiment wherever possible. The Water
Horse sometimes
reads as a rattletrap collection of ideas from other successful children's
films, including Bedknobs And Broomsticks, Into The West, E.T., and Free Willy, but few kid films
manage to assemble this much ambition alongside this much sincere, sweet
emotion.