Weekly Movie #9

Big Miracle
Director: Ken Kwapis
Cast: Drew Barrymore, John Krasinski, Kristen Bell, Ted Danson
Released: February 3, 2012
Viewed in theaters: February 29, 2012

I go from one movie that takes place in Alaska and deals with wildlife to another movie that takes place in Alaska and deals with wildlife. Only with this movie, they're trying to help the wildlife! Fun fact: this is the only movie since 2000 I've seen in the theater on Leap Day. Heck, it might be the only movie I've seen in the theater on Leap Day...I started my movie journal in 1999, so I can't tell you if I've seen any on that particular day before that.

This movie is based on a true story that happened in a small town in northern (it is literally at the top of the state!) Alaska called Point Barrow in October 1988 when a family of three grey whales (mommy, daddy, and baby) became trapped when the ice quickly starts enclosing around them. They have plenty of room to swim, but there's only one hole available for them to come up and breathe. The only way they can get free is if the ice is broken for them so they can swim back towards "real" ocean. I had never heard of this incident in my life even though I was in second grade when it happened. In the movie they show school children who only want to do their reports on the whales; but maybe it was an Alaskan school, I wasn't sure on that. There were a few things like that that confused me about the movie. Like I didn't know what the relationship between John Krasinski's character and the young boy was...at first I thought he was his son or little brother...but I think they just knew each other? I don't know.

Drew Barrymore plays Rachel, a Green Peace activist who's an ex-girlfriend of Krasinski's reporter based in Anchorage who's the one who first reports on the whales. While her intentions of helping the whales are admirable, she's a total Dawn Schafer and if you have any idea who I'm talking about then, first of all, high-five, and second of all, you know how annoying she is! There's one scene where she has all her scuba diving gear on because she wants to check in on the whales and I swear she said she's never been trained to scuba dive, so that was stupid! Especially in really cold temperatures! Of course she finds a net on the baby whale's tail, so they can make her doing something really stupid justified, but whatever.

I cried about, oh, four times during this movie. Just one of the many reasons why I see movies by myself! It was a feel-good (and sad at times) movie, but I have a feeling in a few years I'm going to be mistaking this movie with Miracle, the movie that came out a few years ago about the U.S./Russian hockey game during the '80 Olympics.