As a cold, emotionless robot of a man, sappy movies ricochet off me like bullets off an armored car. When Bruce Willis decides to die to save his daughter, his planet, at the end of Armageddon, I most definitely thought it was sad. But that was only because there was a perfectly good Ben Affleck there that we could have sacrificed. If you tell me your eyes welled up a little when you realized Ben was going to live, I’m OK with that. Otherwise, I laugh at your tears.
My programming does have an empathy chip that that sends signals to my brain that allow me to understand why another human being would get sad about that ending. After all, it is a human being dying up on the big screen. I can see where the person sitting next to me in the theater is coming from.
However, my chip lacks the ability to make me emotionally invested as to whether a dolphin lives or dies in a movie. It definitely won’t prevent me from laughing at you if you get weepy. So I’m sure when the makers of Dolphin Tale, a PG-rated movie about a dolphin named Winter who must overcome the loss of her tail, created the TV ads for the movie, they weren’t trying to appeal to me. Well, if they were trying to appeal to the side of me that becomes filled with questions that lack answers, they hit the nail on the head.
I’m pretty sure there’s three ads being run in heavy rotation. I’ve seen them all. The first point I’d like to address is the fact one of the trailers reveals the star of the movie, the dolphin named Winter, is played by the dolphin named Winter. That’s right. Winter is playing herself in her first-ever motion picture. I’m really not sure how accurate the representation will be. Will Winter be playing herself, or will it be like Larry David on Curb Your Enthusiasm? Seeing as how this movie is based on a true story, I hope Winter stays true and doesn’t just become a caricature and start picking fights with people who have Parkinson’s.
But the bigger problem with the commercial revealing Winter is the star of this movie is this — the movie is all about how this dolphin has basically zero chance of living without a tail. According to the trailer, the dolphin as a “one in a million” chance at living. But if Winter is *IN* the movie playing herself, clearly she lived. It sort of sucks the drama out of a movie based entirely on a story that centers on whether the dolphin will survive. Imagine going to see a movie about whether a guy survives cancer, and it stars the guy who survived cancer. I’m guessing he came through OK.
Imagine how hilarious it would be if Winter died at the end. I’d plunk down 12 bucks right now. A theater full of kids all giggly about this dolphin, and in the final scene, the little boy runs out to the aquarium to find the dolphin hung herself because it was all too hard. They drain the pool and find the dolphin wrote, “Winter Was Here” on the glass, leading to Morgan Freeman doing his Shawshank speech. “The dolphin’s been in here fifty years, Heywood. Fifty years! This is all she knows. In here, she’s an important mammal. She’s an educated mammal. Outside, she’s nothin’! Just a used up dolphin without a tail! … They send you here for life, and that’s exactly what they take. The part that counts, anyway, which is the tail.”
Moving forward, let’s focus next on the odds of the dolphin’s survival — one in a million. Who is the person in Las Vegas setting the odds on the ability of a dolphin to regain its capacity to swim after it loses its tail? I know you can bet on virtually anything these days, but this seems pretty sick. What sort of empirical evidence are these odds based on? I’m guessing there must be a couple dolphins that have lost tails, but not a lot. Hey, was that the plot of 500 Days of Summer? Summer loses her tail, Joseph Gordon-Levitt mourns for 500 days because Summer dies from a lack of tail, then he meets Autumn on that job interview, she dies in the waiting area from a lack of tail, then he meets Morgan Freeman who says GET BUSY SWIMMIN’ OR GET BUSY DYIN’!
Sorry, I got lost there for a minute. I guess I’m saying I’m not on board with cutting the tails off of 999,999 dolphins in attempt to fix them and set accurate odds. However, I’d like to parlay the next dolphin who shows up sans tail regaining the ability to swim with the next bird who loses its wings regaining the ability to fly. Ten bucks to win a billion.
In the latest ad, I don’t know what’s happening. The little kid who finds the dolphin is talking with a dude in a wheelchair about life. The kid also looks up Morgan Freeman on the Internet and finds him and convinces him to help the dolphin. Does this kid have parents? I bet in the movie he does and they say things like SOMETIMES DOLPHINS DIE GO DO YOUR HOMEWORK. Then the kid sneaks out the window and boards a bus to wherever Morgan Freeman is and talks him into saving the dolphin’s life. All movies need villains and I bet they are the kid’s parents.
First off, ever meet a kid? Kids are idiots. The commercials will have me believe this kid rescued a dolphin, is instrumental in it learning how to swim again, and figured out a way to track down Morgan Freeman by Googling “Dolphins who need bionic tails” and found him, and he happens to live close by. It’s based on a true story so I guess it happened, but it all seems a bit far-fetched. Getting past all that, when Morgan Freeman shows up at the Aquarium For Disfigured Animals, the kid apologizes to Harry Connick Jr. because HOLY COW THIS MOVIE STARS HARRY CONNICK JR. the kid was afraid Harry Connick Jr. would be mad about SERIOUSLY YOU GUYS HARRY CONNICK JR. bringing in Morgan Freeman to help.
This raises a question or two about Harry Connick Jr. for me. Let’s say you’re him, and you work at the Aquarium For Disfigured Animals. That says, unlike me, you are extremely compassionate and are willing to do anything you can do help sick animals. Why would this kid think HC2 wouldn’t be down with bringing in a wise old man who specializes in prosthetic animal parts to help Winter? Would needing help hurt HC2′s standing in the disfigured marine animals community? Is part of the story that HC2 is up for a cover story on Mutilated Dolphin Monthly and letting this guy help take away some of his spotlight?
Or there’s option 2, that HC2 is racist. This is a PG movie so I doubt they’ll be delving into that topic, so I lean toward the Mutilated Dolphin Monthly option.
Of course, this movie is going to end on a high note, with Winter living and launching an acting career. Knowing the ending clearly didn’t hurt Apollo 13, so I doubt people will stay away because of that. But I think they need to ramp up the sentimentality for the ending. I want Winter to live, get drafted by the Baltimore Ravens to play to left tackle, have a catch with a young version of her dead dad in an Iowa cornfield, then blow up an asteroid to save the world.
Or have Winter die and let Morgan Freeman end the movie with, “Hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies. Except Winter the Dolphin. She was good and she died.”
Roll credits.
