An all-together ho-hum experience considering the coolness of the subject matter, “Morning Light’ is Roy E. Disney’s attempt to document the open-sea race, Transpac, a harrowing 2,500 race from California to Hawaii. Expertly captured, the problem lies with its reality television-like approach.
Roy E. Disney has sailed the Transpac over fifteen times now clearly in love with both sailing and the challenges this long journey presents.
But instead of documenting himself, he and producer Leslie DeMeuse decide to rope in a younger audience by selecting a group of 15 candidates whom only 11 will be chosen for the race through a series of training vignettes.
These fifteen kids (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.
Get me a farm boy from Oklahoma, a poor Jewish kid from Brooklyn, a black kid from the ghetto, etc. and maybe we would have an interesting human dynamic. I suppose it could be said 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’-like confessionals?
So yeah, I wanted 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.
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.
The film is presented with a 1.85:1 AVC encode and the results are expected for the varying HD camera footage used. A lot of the helicopter shots have some detail but the handheld shots get a bit grainy, particularly night footage. The DTS-HD aud track is fine and along the same lines as the video – there’s only so much that can be done with a documentary.
Special Features consist of a couple of featurettes, the first ‘Stories from the Sea, a half-hour making-of and ‘Making the Cut’, an ESPN special that runs about 45 minutes and looks at the process of choosing the finalists.
There is a pair of featurettes included with this movie. The first is Stories from the Sea, a 28-minute documentary on the race and the making of the film. Next up is Making the Cut an ESPN special that runs about 48 minutes and looks at the how the finalists for the race were chosen. These two were nice additions to the disc.
Overall, it was pretty negligible documentary experience which was kind of surprising when taking into account how much cinematic tension could have been squeezed from a sailboat-race across the Pacific.
For me, I was rather annoyed that almost all (if not all) of the kids chosen were wealthy and a bit whiny and when the first half of the film documents this, I was close to giving up. When the race starts, the film picks up speed but a bit too little too late. For sailing buffs, it’s probably worth a watch but everyone else can safely skip this one.
Morning Light [Blu-ray] is now available at Amazon . Visit the DVD database for more information.
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