Disney / Buena Vista | 2008 | 98 mins
Executive produced by Walt’s nephew Roy Disney, Morning Light chronicles a real-life crew training and competing in the 44th Transpacific Yacht Race aboard a TP52 class yacht, Morning Light. I didn’t know this but Disney is a multiple winner and big player in the Transpacific Yacht Race–Transpac, for short. Competitors sail from Point Fermin at Los Angeles, to Diamond Head, Honolulu–a distance of 2,225 miles. It’s the Indy 500 of yachting, a tradition since 1906, one of the most dangerous races in sailing, and Disney has competed in 17 of them. Disney first competed in 1975 at the age of 45 and says he wanted to give young sailors the kind of opportunity he never had.
To that end, a call went out in 2007 for sailors who had never competed in the Transpac. Over 500 men and women applied. From that group, Disney and his team selected 30 finalists who had to come to Long Beach, California for try-outs. It was a reality competition in itself, and ESPN aired a special, Morning Light: Making the Cut, which showcased the trials. Eventually, Disney and his team narrowed the field down to 15 sailors; Asked by an interviewer if he was looking for people among the 15-member crew that might “create a little drama during the training or the race,” Disney remarked, “No. I don’t think we can afford to be cutesy like that. We’ve got a boat that’s got to go 2,500 miles safely and, hopefully, competitively.”
Though Disney was clearly aware he was making a film, he wasn’t willing to sacrifice the race for some Hollywood drama.
I’ll admit to being a little disappointed when we were introduced to the 15 finalists that were going to train for the race. All of the finalists were from fairly well-to-do backgrounds, white, predominately male and attending top notch schools such as Stanford, Harvard and Brown. There are two women in the group and one black man, who had “the least amount of experience” according to the narrator and who later admitted, “I don’t really grasp the concept of sailing across the ocean.” Oh yeah, and he can’t swim. The rest of the group was kind enough not to give him the nickname “token”.
The group of fifteen who went through the rigorous training were as follows: Jeremy Wilmot, Chris Clark, Jesse Fielding, Kate Theisen, Chris Branning, Steve Manson, Charlie Enright, Graham Zawadzki, Chris Welch, Robbie Kane, Kit Will, Chris Schubert, Genny Tulloch, Pieter van Os, and Mark Towill. The oldest member of the team? 23. The youngest? 18.
I’ve never been a fan of sailing, so I didn’t expect to find much about Morning Light to enjoy. The digital cameras capture some breathtaking shots at seas and those are worth seeing. However, first time director couldn’t seem to decide what the focus of the film should be. Is this a film about a crew learning to work together? The Transpac? The day-to-day feelings of the participants? Ultimately, Morning Light feels like it moved from idea to idea, in a struggle to find the films emotional center. It’s that uncertainty of purpose that keeps Morning Light from being a great experience. We don’t really get to know enough about the 11 crew members that ultimately sailed in the 44th Transpacific Yacht Race, to feel emotionally invested in their journey.
Bound by the inherent limitations of its many video sources (which include high definition cameras, traditional film stock, standard definition video, and low-quality archive footage, among others), Morning Light’s 1080p/AVC-encoded transfer looks about as good as a weathered, fast-n-frantic high seas documentary could be expected to look. Skintones are relatively natural throughout, colors are suitably vibrant, blacks are generally well resolved, and detail is fairly impressive. Still, artifacting, source noise, and other technical oddities continually plague the image: clean shots are few and far between, and hazy scenesare a regular occurrenceNinety percent of the transfer’s shortcomings should be attributed to the original footage, not the technical proficiency of the transfer. That being said, it’s impossible to tell where source discrepancies end and encoding errors begin. Ultimately, documentary fans anyone with appropriate expectations will enjoy this transfer.
The same should be said about Disney’s uneven DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 surround track. Dialogue is at the mercy of the waves: prioritization is passable, but only so far as the audio engineers are able to retain the clarity of individual sounds. Pouring rain, booming thunder, creaking wood, powerful winds and blaring seaside music all take a crack at overwhelming the young racers’ voices. At the same time, LFE support and rear speaker activity is commendable. Hearing the Morning Light slam against the water provides a visceral rush. Anyone who’s familiar with a documentary of this nature won’t be distracted. All things considered, Morning Light’s DTS-HD MA track is a reliable one.
Morning Light has a couple of special features:
• Stories from the Sea (29:02) A look at the race and the production with crew members, trainers, and the documentarians who captured it all on film.
• Morning Light: Making the Cut (42:00) A special which aired on ESPN, concentrates solely on the trials and selection process. There’s more footage here than in the film, so in some respects we get more depth than in the feature.
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