Hollywood Today - Cuddly Waterhorse Grows Big Teeth (2007)
MoviesOnline.ca
21st December 2007
By Robin Rowe
HOLLYWOOD, CA (Hollywood Today) 12/20/07 – “The Water Horse” isn’t just the story of a boy and his sea monster. “Our main character Angus, his mother is the housekeeper at a house at the side of the loch and his father is missing in the Second World War,” says Ben Chaplin. “The Water Horse,” based on the book by Dick King-Smith, is a family adventure fantasy in the genre of “Narnia” and “The Golden Compass,” without the Vatican ragging it.
“When they told me I’d have to do underwater scenes I’d never done that before,” says Alex Etel. “I had to learn to snorkel and scuba dive.” Because I’ve been in Scotland the loch water scenes left me cold…as in brrrrrrr! That water is freezing! Etel is convincing as the troubled little boy, yet his character is ultimately annoying.
Meanwhile, the boy’s mother Emily Watson is offered her choice of Chaplin as the darkly handsome Wuthering Heights working man or the stiff upper lip charmer David Morrissey who plays Captain Hamilton. The officious captain has been installed in her home with his regiment encamped on her front lawn to defend Scotland from any Nazi invaders. For a mother, Watson’s character is strangely aloof from her young son who’s having trouble coping without his father. “He’s very alone,” says Watson. “He lives in his own head. It’s like having an imaginary friend, but it’s an imaginary friend who turns out to be real.”
I wish we saw more of newcomer Priyanka Xi, who plays the boy’s perky loyal sister Kirstie. Priyanka Xi is delightful.
So why is Chaplin, the estate’s hunky handyman and stand-in father in The Water Horse, not in the war? “We don’t really know his history”, says Chaplin. “It’s mysterious that he’s not in uniform fighting, and we find out in the course of the film what he’s been up to.” Ben Chaplin is fabulous, playing his role with the type of smoldering intensity that Matthew Macfadyen gave Mr. Darcy in Pride & Prejudice. Chaplin exudes the darkly handsome looks of Antonio Banderas.
The film uses a device from The Princess Bride that the story is set up as being told to us by someone as a tale. Unfortunately, The Water Horse has as its eager on screen audience a couple impossibly gullible hick tourists visiting a pub in Scotland. The pub denizen telling the longwinded water horse story turns out to be exactly who you expect. The overuse of flashbacks reaches the preposterous extreme that the child Angus has an earlier flashback of when he was an even younger child from within a flashback. The “it’s just a tale” device doesn’t work here. Unlike The Princess Bride, we’re being asked to simultaneously believe the story is really set during WW2 and is a magical fantasy like Narnia.
The water horse, as anyone who’s seen the trailer knows, grows from a cute seal-like reptile that swims in the toilet, into the enormous Loch Nech monster. The visual effects are top notch, from New Zealand’s Weta Digital that did Lord of the Rings. The film was shot in New Zealand and Scotland.
This family adventure dwells too much on a lonely boy’s unhappiness and the stupidity of a British officer. It could have been much more fun with more humorously adventurous scenes, like the one shown in the trailer where startled fishermen are dragged along in their boat after snagging the water horse.
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