The Water Horse: Legend of the DeepDirected by Jay Russell
Written by Robert Nelson Jacobs
Starring Alex Etel, Ben Chaplin, Emily Watson
Classification: PG
***
The Second World War is raging, fathers are fighting and dying on foreign soil, but over a quiet lake in the Scottish highlands, the sky is peaceful. On the rocky shore, a lonely young lad finds a barnacled egg, and carries it back to the manor house, where he watches and waits. A crack appears in the egg, then another, and from its luminous interior a famous myth is hatched and a family movie is born. The movie is The Water Horse: Legend of the Deep, and since the lake is Loch Ness, the myth isn't hard to guess – yes, this is a legend about a legend.
It's adapted with charming dispatch from the Dick King-Smith story, and served up by the same CGI wizards who animated the critters in The Lord of the Rings and The Narnia Chronicles. So when Crusoe, for that's what the boy names him, emerges for its oval birthplace, the slick little tyke, half lizard and half foal, looks awfully convincing and downright adorable – E.T. with growth potential. Of course, from that small beginning, the tall tale arises. Naturally, Angus (Alex Etel) keeps the hatchling a secret from his widowed and ever-anxious mother Anne (Emily Watson), not to mention from the platoon of soldiers who have just been billeted in the manor. Led by a spit-and-polish captain, they're on hand to guard the loch against any incursion by Nazi submarines, those other monsters from the deep.
But Crusoe isn't the only stranger newly arrived in town. Enter Mowbray (Ben Chaplin), a dark-haired fellow of few words and a single large scar bisecting his muscled back. Mowbray signs on as a handyman, and handy he proves to be – warming up to Angus and, during one of her rare thaws, even fetching an intrigued glance from Anne. A good thing too, since the lad needs an ally, what with Crusoe ballooning into a secret way too big to hide. Already approaching water pony size, the creature fills up the entire bathtub and, in a comic chase scene guaranteed to have the kiddies chuckling, attracts some canine attention from the regimental bulldog.
Having apparently witnessed a thing or two in his mysterious life, Mowbray is commendably unfazed by his first encounter with Crusoe. Indeed, he generously tell us of its origins in Celtic lore and, when the newborn reaches dolphin proportions, helps with the transport out to the loch. There, cavorting about, it soon grows into full monster-hood, whereupon the effects just get more special: Crusoe in bloom makes for a very credible Nessie, ginormous but ever so graceful and quite the swimmer too.
Alas, when Angus hops aboard its mountainous back to go for a ride, a few laps of the loch, director Jay Russell does let us down a wee bit. This sequence should be magical, soaring above the waters and diving below, yet Russell misses the magic and instead gives us what those CGI types are far too proud of – mere realism. Still, with New Zealand doing yeoman's work standing in for Scotland, he does capture the postcard prettiness of the place.
But where, you might well ask, is the dramatic tension in the tale? After all, Crusoe is a friendly monster, Mowbray has revealed himself to be a fine ersatz daddy, and the innocent boy is an innocent boy. Such a surfeit of goodness demands its counter-balance of evil – in short, who's the bad guy?
Well, despite their cannons pointed menacingly over the loch, you can't be demonizing the British army (although one of those troopers does have a nasty cast to his countenance). Ultimately, the worst the script can come up with is that pompous captain, who trusts no one not in uniform, with the notable exception of Anne. He does seem to have set his cap firmly in mommy's direction, and that alone may be enough to raise the ire of the eight-year-olds in the crowd.
If not, the relative dearth of villainy ceases to matter when the picture blows toward its weather-beaten climax, with the wind howling and the waves crashing and a desperate Crusoe struggling to flee the shackles of realism and escape into the open waters of myth. With a sight so stormy followed by a denouement so sweet, who in the family would dare to go away disappointed?
Okay, perhaps a little disappointed, but only if you like your legends less manufactured and more memorable, not so smoothly delivered and rougher at the psychological edges. So protective parents rest easy: It's perfectly safe to bring your own little Anguses to see The Water Horse. I'll leave it for wiser heads than mine to know whether safety is what a child most needs from a children's story.
The Water Horse opens across Canada tomorrow.
