A Scientist at the Movies Reviews by Greg Paris

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Title: The Water Horse: Legend of the Deep

Date Viewed: 12/28/07

Details:

Alex Etel

Emily Watson

Ben Chaplin

David Morrissey

Brian Cox

Director: Jay Russell

Score: 1/2

The Review: Light family fare with a playful baby Nessie. Clearly children's fare at the start, but this status is reluctantly relinquished in the final third of the film when it turns uncharacteristically violent. At least from the perspective of a child -- the adults in the audience will be unaffected.

It's 1942, in the middle of WW-II, and two convergent events befuddle a young boy's (Etel) life: he discovers an unusual egg-shaped rock at the shoreline, and an artillery battalion is billeted in the lochside country estate where he is growing up. The former (as given away in the trailers) becomes the titular water kelpie; the latter serves as a disgruntling background as the lad awaits his absent father's return home from serving in the Navy. The loch happens to be Loch Ness, so we have another contemporary myth about the origins and natural history of Nessie.

As I've mentioned before, from long-term romantic and scientific fascination, I'm an easy mark for anything connected with Scotland's Loch Ness. No one has yet done a really interesting movie about the loch and its (possible) inhabitant(s), fact or fiction -- balancing biology, geology, adventure, thrills of the unknown, and the lure of spectacular countryside. This is the fifth movie I've found about the topic, but it's the first seen on the big theatre screen. The litany includes: Secret of the Loch (1934); Loch Ness (1996); Beneath Loch Ness (2001); and Incident at Loch Ness (2004). (A sixth, quite bad one, came out in the interim while writing the review: Beyond Loch Ness (2008 TV).) In my mind, Water Horse is the highest-rated of all, so far -- in large part due to attractive cinematography, decent technical film-making, and good SFX. The director has taken the positive step of using a lot of Highland scenery and more picturesque angles of Loch Ness itself -- from mid-loch and long establishing shots of the loch in context -- although it is sprinkled liberally with some distinctly southern Scot-like scenes from New Zealand.

However, for all that this is a moderately engaging story, it did not sufficiently focus me so as to prevent my mind from wandering into quibble territory:

• Geography: Alas, Loch Ness is not a sea loch, nor is Loch Morar, another putative home for cryptic denizens cited by one of the characters. In addition, neither Lochs Lochy nor Linnhe are connected to Ness except via a rather long, skinny (Caledonian) canal. Nor, other than a small crannog in the south near Fort Augustus, are there any islands in the loch. A significant degree of geographical license has been taken with the Great Glen, and it needn't have (it all seems in support of a cheap "Free Willy" moment).
• Climate: It's May in the highlands (at least that's what the calendar tells us), and the mountains surrounding Loch Ness are shown as snow-covered (while unusual for May, it's not unheard of; although it's always possible these are in New Zealand). In either case, the deep waters of Loch Ness are stably cold (about 42F year round); the surface waters of are chilly at the best of times, and altogether frigid in spring. If anyone were to take a long swim, they would likely go unconscious due to hypothermia long before needing to come to the surface for another breath of air.
• Biology: An hermaphrodite Nessie was something I was writing about back in the mid 1970's, but something I never saw discussed in the "open cryptozoic literature" (such as it is). So it's good to see someone try to use this concept to deal with low population densities and minimal supporting food webs. On the other hand, even grey whales don't go through growth spurts suggested by the film -- for "let's speed up the timeframe" reasons, no doubt -- and although understandable, considerable suspension of disbelief is required to swallow this plot necessity.
• Sighting chronology: For all of the activity of WW-II in the highlands (pay attention -- that's irony speaking), reported Nessie sightings were not prominent during the war. They actually peaked in the period between 1933-34 (during a downturn in the tourist economy), then retreated to a mere trickle until the 1960's.
• Scottish tourist board: Although a lot of the establishing shots are in the Great Glen, not all of them are. Substantial filming has also been done in New Zealand, and although some of that countryside has a distinctly Scotian aspect to it, it's not quite the same.

(31-Dec-07)

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