The Water Horse: Legend of the Deep
Saturday, December 29th, 2007 |
The Water Horse: Legend of the Deep is a 2007 fantasy film directed by Jay Russell. The screenplay was written by Robert Nelson Jacobs, based on the novel The Water Horse by Dick King-Smith. The film stars Alex Etel as the juvenile lead, and Emily Watson and David Morrissey as the principal adult characters. The film was released in the United States on December 25, 2007 and will be released in the United Kingdom on February 1, 2008.
The story combines fantasy with real world legend as a young Scottish boy named Angus discovers a mysterious egg that soon hatches a bizarre dragon/dinosaur-like creature. Angus names him Crusoe. Soon after Crusoe grows too big to be hidden within Angus’s home, he’s placed in Loch Ness, where he becomes the famous Loch Ness Monster.
The film picks up immediately after the events of Alien vs. Predator. The Predator (”Scar”), who was impregnated by a face hugger before being killed by an Alien Queen at the end of the first film, gives birth to a Predalien on board his clan’s ship, which then sneaks aboard a scout craft headed for Earth and runs amok. As the Predalien rampages through the ship, a Predator attempts to kill it with his plasma caster and inadvertently shoots a hole through the ship’s hull, causing it to crash in the forests outside of Gunnison, Colorado. The ship’s crew dies either upon the crash or by the Predalien, which escapes. A boy and his father who are deer hunting see the crash and go to check it out. Both of them come across the wreckage of the ship-on board, and several face huggers escape from the damaged containment tubes and quickly impregnate them both.
Giselle (Amy Adams) lives in the blissful animated world of Andalasia, where magical beings frolic freely, animals are talkative companions and musical interludes punctuate every interaction. She dreams of her true love and builds a statue wearing a blue jacket to represent him from her dream with the help of her chipmunk friend Pip and other forest animals. She sings about her true love’s kiss, and Prince Edward (James Marsden), a handsome and valiant but dimwitted prince who hears her voice in the forest and rescues her from a troll. Giselle and Edward get engaged, but her fate takes a turn for worse on her wedding day when his stepmother, the villainous Queen Narissa (Susan Sarandon), throws her through a magic portal to a place where there is no happily ever after in order to keep her step son single and thus remain queen.
Lyra Belacqua (Richards) is a young orphan girl who lives in a parallel universe in which a person’s soul resides outside the body in the form of an animal called a “daemon.” The land is controlled by the Magisterium, an authoritarian organisation which restricts freedoms in order to impose its own systems of belief upon the populace. A ward of Jordan College, Lyra spends her free time with the local children and her best friend, Roger (Walker). Lyra and the others tell of the “Gobblers,” who they hold responsible for the disappearance of several local children.