Reviewed by Kirsten Anderberg. Viewed at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival 2020.<\/p>\n
Rick Rosenthal, marine biologist and director, offers his audience an unusual glimpse into the secret lives of whales in his 49 minute documentary entitled, “Whale Wisdom.” Stunning photography tracks a wide selection of whales, including humpbacks, orcas, and sperm whales, in beautiful scenery from Alaska and Mexico to the Azores, Cook Islands, and Patagonia. This 2019 film shows whales often outsmarting those around them, while also highlighting the depth of emotion and communication within whale culture. Narration throughout the film by David Attenborough, with his English accent and background as a natural historian, lends an air of credibility to the production. This film won awards at film festivals in Europe, the United States, India, and elsewhere.<\/p>\n
The plot of the movie revolves around short segments focusing on whales performing different tricks or traits that reflect more complex thought patterns than often attributed to marine mammals. Imaginative solutions to problems, and group dynamics, interplay with man-made environments as well as natural hierarchies to illustrate the cleverness of these mammals. Touching displays of family life, and whales engaging in behaviors such as surfing and “hugging,” humanize the whales, extracting empathy from the audience. While the movie has some rich photography, and offers approximately 8 sub-stories of different amusing and interesting behaviors of whales, I found it was light on science and substance.<\/p>\n
While these short stories were entertaining, I found much of the material was common knowledge, and while most of the segments have the director in the location shots, there is footage of whales hunting seals in shallow water that has trended on social media for years; I have seen this exact footage repeatedly online. And the director is missing in this footage. It seemed like that part was purchased and inserted, whereas the other shots had continuity by having the director on site for veracity and credibility. Certainly, if the whole film had been clips such as that footage of whales hunting seals that has saturated social media, the film would have completely lacked merit.<\/p>\n
When I saw this film advertised, I thought of the amazing 2015 IMAX film, “Humpback Whales,” directed by G. MacGillivray. I saw that film at the Pacific Science Center in Seattle, WA in their IMAX theater, and it was breathtaking. The exaggerated size of the screen immersed you into the ocean with the whales. Marine mammals already enormous in real life were monstrous on the IMAX screen and the cinematography left you speechless afterwards. Remembering that experience, I looked forward to viewing this film. Perhaps because of my comparing this production with the extreme scale of that IMAX film, I found this film to be lacking something. But it left me unfulfilled in more ways than the lack of grandiose cinematography and oversized screens. “Whale Wisdom” left me wanting for more science, more things that are not common knowledge, and for a better plot. The loosely connected short stories within this film just felt half-finished: as if more research, history, and facts, would have made it more interesting. It felt like this film barely scratched the surface.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Reviewed by Kirsten Anderberg. Viewed at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival 2020. Rick Rosenthal, marine biologist and director, offers his audience an unusual glimpse into the secret lives of whales in his 49 minute documentary entitled, “Whale Wisdom.” Stunning photography tracks a wide selection of whales, including humpbacks, orcas, and sperm whales, in beautiful […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":247861,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[75,3,404],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-46530","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-documentary","category-films","category-santa-barbara-film-festival-2020"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/g9r.3b8.myftpupload.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46530","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/g9r.3b8.myftpupload.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/g9r.3b8.myftpupload.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/g9r.3b8.myftpupload.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/247861"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/g9r.3b8.myftpupload.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=46530"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/g9r.3b8.myftpupload.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46530\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":46579,"href":"https:\/\/g9r.3b8.myftpupload.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/46530\/revisions\/46579"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/g9r.3b8.myftpupload.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=46530"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/g9r.3b8.myftpupload.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=46530"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/g9r.3b8.myftpupload.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=46530"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}