Based on the true story of the loggerhead turtle(Caretta caretta), The Incredible Journey is a beautiful documentary about the demanding,arduous and sometimes grueling journey of a sea turtle over the course of more than twenty years.The movie starts with the hatchlings born on a beach in Florida. The narrator tells us that turtles lived on land 200 years ago.However,when dinosaurs came they became creatures of the tides and currents. However land did not want to let them go and demanded payment.After about a journey of 25 years every female turtle must return to the beach where she was born under the sand and dug her way into the surface in three days. A journey that starts with no teeth and no defenses but with merely the indomitable will to live, a baby turtle must hurry to the sea which is just forty meters away.Unfortunately the beach is a great divide where half of the hatchlings will be perished in just an hour. The heroine of this documentary makes it into the sea on time. She swims to the Gulf Stream all the way to the frozen north, fights the doldrums when her seaweed is captured by an eddy,she faces up with her dangerous travel-mates like the blue shark and she tries to be one in ten-thousand to survive this ordeal and continue her circle of life. It's apparent that the makers of this film put a lot of work into this project. It must have taken a great deal of work to follow a turtle all along the way but somehow I don't think this documentary had that special "je ne sais quoi",the intangible quality that makes it stand out among the genre. If you have seen lots of documentaries and if you are an aficionado of the genre you may not find it sui-generis.Moreover,the voice-over narration (Miranda Richardson) does not really sound like one you would hear in a documentary. I mean,when you hear a voice like "David Frederick Attenborough" you will know you are watching some natural history program. Yet again, the movie is quite a serious work for our world in which the numbers of these turtles are decreasing in spite of the conservation efforts. It gives us hope for the future of these animals and it deserves to be watched.
Review of Turtle: The Incredible Journey
A loggerhead is never lost through her invisible but indelible ancestral roots.
14 April 2010
Warning: Spoilers