Turtle: The Incredible Journey [Blu-ray]

Description

Product Description TURTLE: THE INCREDIBLE JOURNEY is the story of a little loggerhead turtle, as she follows in the path of her ancestors on one of the most extraordinary journeys in the natural world.Born on a beach in Florida, she rides the Gulf Stream up towards the Arctic and ultimately swims around the entire North Atlantic across to Africa and back to the beach where she was born. But the odds are stacked against her; just one in ten thousand turtles survive the journey. She faces many hazards, her siblings are lost in the doldrums of the Sargasso Sea, she comes face to face with creatures of the deep and nearly dies at the hands of fishermen. She travels up north but she drifts from her life current, the Gulf Stream, into dangerously cold waters.When she finally reaches the Azores on the other side of the Atlantic, she sees the greatest celebration of life on the Earth as sperm whale and baitballs explode from the water. But deep and powerful changes are happening in the oceans the fish are disappearing, sea levels are rising, the turtles birthing beach could be washed away and bring a way of life to an end.Then her calling comes, she must return to her beach. When she finally reaches the shores of Florida, 25 years will have passed!Under a million stars, she crawls out of the sea to lay her own eggs and keeps the Turtles Journey alive. Review A solitary long-distance traveler with prehistoric cachet, the loggerhead turtle makes a compelling subject for a nature film, as the spectacularly shot, aptly named Turtle: The Incredible Journey demonstrates, if at times too feverishly. Director Nick Stringer has availed himself of up-to-the-minute technology and old-school storytelling -- the kind with just a touch of anthropomorphizing but, mercifully, no character names -- to capture the arc of the marine reptile's first 25 years. It's a migration from Florida to the North Atlantic, Africa, the Caribbean and back to the place of birth to lay eggs. The film is fact-packed and kid-friendly yet filled with danger; only one in 10,000 turtles completes that round trip. The peril begins the moment the sand-encrusted hatchlings emerge, soft-shelled and toothless, to make their vulnerable scuttle to the sea. Via miniature high-def cameras, the documentary captures their race against predatory crabs with extraordinary immediacy. For the rest of the trip, Stringer creates a composite portrait, seamlessly supplementing his in-the-wild footage with digital effects and studio scenes using rescued turtles. Attempting to amplify the drama but instead calling attention to themselves are an unyielding score and narration that tints toward purple, delivered with mellifluous authority by Miranda Richardson. Yet the film's conservation pitches are subdued; this is no galvanizing doc like The Cove. Charting the peregrinations of one of Earth's elders -- a creature that has navigated the seas for 200 million years, and is now endangered --Incredible Journey makes some missteps, but never falters in showing that the loggerhead's survival matters. --The Los Angeles TimesThe trailer for Turtle: The Incredible Journey promises more excitement than you might suspect could be packed into a story about loggerhead turtles, a plucky seafarer with high mileage. Since it played at the Toronto International Film Festival, where it was in the documentary lineup, the movie has picked up plenty of goodwill and awards. Last year its director of photography, Rory McGuinness, won a wildlife/nature award from the Australian Cinematographers Society. Given the quality of their work, the special-effects wizards who whipped up some visual wow for the movie, including computer-generated imagery, deserve a share of the applause too. The journey of the loggerhead turtle is, by any measure, an amazing life voyage, one that here reaches from the beaches of Florida to the eerie calm of the Sargasso Sea and the watery speedway known as the Gulf Stream before heading to Africa and then the call of motherhood. It s a trip that eats up thousands of miles, takes some two dozen years and is fraught with dangers, though sometimes in the movie that threat may be more imaginary than actual, as when a basking shark, the second largest fish in the world, cruises by with its weird wide mouth open, yawning in water and prey. Armed with little teeth, the basking shark feeds on krill and plankton, but its size and cavernous mouth do make for dramatic viewing. And there s plenty of nail-biting tension in Turtle: The Incredible Journey, including in the melodramatic voice-over by Miranda Richardson, so much that you may find yourself volubly rooting for the animal, or she as Ms. Richardson calls the movie s ostensible single turtle. --The New York TimesIt takes 25 years for a loggerhead turtle to make its way from Florida to the other side of the Atlantic and back again, but it took only two years for resourceful Brit filmmaker Nick Stringer to chronicle the voyage in the visually resplendent Turtle: The Incredible Journey. Subtly anthropomorphizing its chosen species in traditional nature-doc fashion, this well-lensed primer on one of Mother Nature's more harrowing trips reps fine educational fare for tots and should get by swimmingly in tube, homevid and possible theatrical channels. Opening sequence, set on a Florida beach, crosscuts rather over-dramatically between a newly hatched loggerhead and a predatory crab, immediately establishing the prey-or-be-preyed-upon threat that will characterize the turtle's long journey ahead -- through the Gulf Stream to the Azores, an archipelago nearly 1,000 miles off the coast of Portugal, then back home to lay its eggs. Along the way, a stately supporting cast of whales, sharks, jellyfish and luminescent microbes offer abundant distractions for Rory McGuinness' HD camera. Music is a tad over-insistent, but Miranda Richardson's narration strikes the right note of awe. --Variety