Dolphin Tale is the feel good story about a dolphin that is rescued from his natural habitat to be enslaved in the confines of an aquatic prison for the amusement of humans...and it is downright gross. This film is loosely based on a truely unbelievable true story.
Synopsis:
In the tradition of Free Willy the film follows a troubled young boy (Sawyer Nelson) with no father who is doing poorly in school and has no friends. One day on his way to skipping Summer School the boy stumbles upon a dolphin (who is later named "Winter") loosely entangled in a crab trap and, with the help of an old drunkard, cuts him loose. Soon after the rescue volunteers from a local animal hospital come and kidnap the dolphin while the unlikely heros are trying to get him back in the water. The director of the animal hospital, Dr. Clay Haskett, makes the executive decision to remove the dolphin's tail in order to save the creature from possible back discomfort. In the meantime, Sawyer's mother decides it would be in the boy's best interest to let him drop out of school altogether so he can pursue a lifestyle of helping animals while living off of handouts and government assistance the rest of his days. The newly formed animal rescue team recruits the services of a nearby orthopedic specialist, Dr. Cameron McCarthy, who normally serves wounded military personal and convinces him to turn his back on our fallen human heros to devote his expertise to the dolphin. After thousands of hours and millions of dollars invested in the dolphin's tail, Winter rejects the tail and destroys it, along with the hopes of the entire team. Soon after a hurricane destroys the entire town where they live, threatening to close the animal hospital unless they sell to a greedy Capitalist pig who wants to convert the property into a safe haven for human beings. Rather than give in to the offer on the table, young Sawyer and his girlfriend decide to turn Winter into a freak show where people can come and pay 2 bits to come and gawk at the hideously deformed figure. This, coupled with a large-scale carnival raise several million dollars to help the shelter, while at the same time the Capitalist investor is forced at gunpoint by Greenpeace animal activists to fully fund the rescue operation and revoke his plans to build his hotel. All ends well when Dr. McCarthy arrives at the carnival with Winter's new tail, the product of billions of dollars and almost 2 years of research, and the dolphin accepts the tail.
Review:
If you want to save 2 hours of your life I can pretty much sum up the film as follows: Animals are more important than people. In this film a town is destroyed by a hurricane and what do they do? Come together to help this dolphin while thousands of people are displaced. A war hero comes home from the front lines and what happens? A dolphin gets a prosthetic tail while the man gets a knee brace. This is enough to make one sick but then throw in the fact that a child's mother allows him to throw his education in the waste receptacle to help out this dolphin, and it becomes unbearable. Another thing that really bothers me about this true story is the total price tag of producing the dolphin tail. If you add it all up the grand total (including labor hours) is over $13 billion. A truely staggering number, especially considering the current state of the economy and the number of humans that could use some real financial help.
A few additional notes on the actual production of the movie:
-The computer animation is sub par.
-The all-star cast is squandered on this feel-bad story.
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