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Movie:		5.0
Picture:		10.0
Sound:		6.0
Extras:		6.0
Score:		6.0

Director(s):	Mark Monroe
Starring:	Roy Disney
Genre:	Documentary • Sports
Website:	http://disneydvd.disney.go.com/morning-light.html
Release Date:	June 16, 2009
Rated:

List Price:	Blu-ray - $25.99
Amazon:

The process of determining which sports will translate into great films has no real rhyme or reason. If you thought that only fast-paced sports like soccer or football could be made into sports (Goal!, Any Given Sunday), then you’d have a hard time explaining all the successful films based on baseball or golf (Field of Dreams, Caddyshack). What sports films of the past have taught us is that even films about running (Chariots of Fire) can be superb with the proper balance of plot, character and wit. Well, Disney certainly loves the promise that holds and has started cranking out sports movies as fast as possible. Up until this point however, most of them (Iron Will, The Greatest Game Ever Played, Remember the Titans) have been narrative based. For Morning Light Disney went ahead and made a Reality TV formatted film about sailing and, well, the results are mixed.

Roy Disney decides to go all “rich billionaire with a film studio” and lends a high-speed racing yacht to 15 youths so they can train and enter the Trans Pacific (TransPac), a race across the loneliest stretch of ocean to a finishing point in Hawaii. Taking its cue from its reality roots, it doesn’t just plunge into the voyage. Oh no, instead we get a solid 40 minutes of the team learning, bonding and eventually choosing the 11 amongst them who will actually get to race. Morning Light pulls out all of the traditional “real-life” stops by latching onto a few key personalities and taking us through their trials in the opening stages. Broken arms, an inability to swim and a few other circumstances befall team members, but nothing so intriguing as to boost the first half with any real excitement.

Clearly director Mark Monroe intended for the choosing of the team to be a moment of great dramatic and emotional strength – but it feels rather impotent. It’s less his fault that it is that of hindsight editing. There’s no question that the cameras spent an equal amount of time with each youth and then edited appropriate lengths according to their magnetism on screen, but that’s really what spoils the suspense of the moment. With each person drawn into the official 11-person troupe, there’s no real surprise. The film featured more of those people, and the one exception to the rule was a kid who didn’t know how to swim. Yes, his story made for an interesting twist in the opening narrative, but there’s no real surprise when he wasn’t chosen for the team.

It’s the last half of the movie, the actual race, where the human drama element of the Reality TV structure finally pays off. The race happens in starts and stops as the wind proves to be quite fickle. While bad for the progress of the race, it helps to stir emotions on deck making the bland crew more interesting. Hearing gripes and passive-aggressive comments isn’t really all that amusing, but it easily beats the somewhat naïve and shallow conversations that occurred in the time leading up to the race.

The video quality is stunning. Shots of the sparkling ocean are absolutely breathtaking at times and the high-definition really shines through. Morning Light has some fantastic visuals when the cameras stray further away from the boat to take in the panoramic sites. The audio consists in large part of narration by the sailors reciting the entries from their personal journals. Let’s just say each and every one of these kids sounds like a sappy inspirational writer. Their inability as narrators is made all the more glaring by having Patrick Warburton, whose voice is one of the greatest ever, narrate the opening 5 minutes of the film – then we never hear from him again. What a tease.

Blu-ray Bonus Features

There may not be many extras but the two that are present are impressively substantial. “Stories From the Sea with Host Jason Earles” features yarns from established professional sailors as they relate some of their most memorable experiences at sea. “Morning Light: Making the Cut” serves as an extension of what we see in the opening half of the film and really will only please the Reality TV junkies who crave even more human drama.

The concept deserves a watch as it’s essentially a real-life, team-based Iron Will. Roy Disney may have been on to something when he dreamed this up, but I’d like to see it done with a slightly older age group to help cut out some of the infantile aspects of the crew. It may not be a perfect sports film, but it can be enjoyed by the casual viewer.