Movie Land

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.

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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.

But Giselle’s plunge into darkness lands her in a strange new world - the unforgiving live-action world of modern day New York City. As the cruelty of this new place wears down the fairy-tale idealism of the once carefree princess, such as a homeless man stealing her tiara, the frightened Giselle meets divorcee Robert Philip (Patrick Dempsey), who takes her into his apartment despite believing that she is a little crazy, and he is nervous for his daughter Morgan. Robert is a divorce lawyer who doesn’t believe in Giselle’s gushings of happily-ever-after and true love’s first kiss. The next morning he becomes aggravated when he and his daughter find Giselle has rats and other vermin cleaning their apartment and that she has constructed a dress using material cut from the curtains. Nancy (Idina Menzel), Robert’s soon-to-be-fiancee, walks in to find Giselle in a towel and leaves assuming the worst. Robert takes her to his office and asks his secretary to find out where Giselle came from, which proves unsuccessful. Giselle starts to sob when she finds out that his client and her husband are getting a divorce, causing Robert’s boss to angrily reprimand him. Robert takes Giselle, and they go outside the building to Central Park.

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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.

When Lyra’s uncle, Lord Asriel (Craig), visits the college, Lyra saves him from assassination at the hands of a Magisterial representative, who wants to prevent Asriel from presenting evidence to the college which indicates the existence of particles called “Dust,” in opposition to official Magisterium doctrine. Asriel obtains funding from the college to mount an expedition to the far north in order to investigate the substance, which he believes originates in a parallel universe to his own, entering the body via a person’s dæmon. Fearing the effects of Dust, the Magisterium is conducting experiments on children in order to find a means of inoculating them against it.

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