Dir.
Mark Monroe, US, 2008, 100 mins, documentary
Cast (as themselves): Chris Branning, Graham Brant-Zawadzki, Chris Clark, Charlie Enright, Jesse Fielding
Review by
Andy Stanton
An all-together ho-hum experience considering the coolness of the subject matter, Morning Light is Disney Exec Roy E. Disney's attempt to document the open-sea race, Transpac, a harrowing 2,500 race from California to Hawaii . Disney has sailed the Transpac over 15 times now and is clearly in love with both sailing and the challenges this long journey presents. Expertly captured, the film's problem lies with its reality television-like approach. Instead of documenting himself, Disney and producer Leslie DeMeuse predictably choose to rope in a younger audience by selecting a group of 15 candidates, of whom only 11 will be chosen for the race through a series of training vignettes.
These 15 kids (including three females and one black guy although they all get cut save for one gal) have almost all been plucked from Ivy League, Upper-class sailing-in-the-blood families which lessens the drama considerably. Instead of offering opportunities to a cross-section of America , the candidate selection pool seems to be limited to a bunch of over-privileged white kids partaking in yet another joy of life that they didn't have to really work for.
Iit could be argued that Disney wanted to focus on the sailing which would explain his candidates but then why bother with half a film of training and the ‘The Real World' confessionals? You want to pretty much slap these kids for having anything to complain about but what can be admired here is the outstanding footage which gets a considerable boost in high-def. Monroe also edits, along with Paul Crowder and, as one would expect from the team who have previously been responsible for the acclaimed surfing documentary Riding Giants and Dog Town and Z Boys , as well as Amazing Journey: Story of the Who , the quality of the filmmaking itself is unquestionable.
Once the race starts, half way through the film, handheld, helicopter and chase boat footage is expertly captured and cut together to provide some excitement, although probably not as much as the filmmakers had hoped for. Overall, it's a pretty negligible documentary experience which is kind of surprising when taking into account how much cinematic tension could have been squeezed from a sailboat-race across the Pacific but then, this is Disney. With the race itself, the film picks up speed but it's too little too late, having first endured the whiny rich kids being auditioned and trained.
For sailing buffs it's probably worth a watch but everyone else can safely let this one sail off into the sunset.
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