After seeming to miss the boat for this summers’ kid’s attention Dolphin Tale is a fun, and rather wet story of a dolphin without a real tail.
The movie is based on the true story of Winter, a wounded dolphin whose experience in a rehabilitation centre in 2005 lead to huge advances within the prosthetics industry.
Many expected this film would be Free Willy but, you know, smaller, and that’s essentially what it is. Ok, so there’s no saving the whale bit, but there’s a kid and there’s a big fish and they become friends.
The film is a perfectly nice tale about a lonely young boy who finds a wounded dolphin on a Florida beach. He then spends the rest of the movie helping rehabilitate the dolphin, who has had to be fitted with a prosthetic tail, and teaching the adults around him a thing or two about friendship and hope.
Actually the film isn’t bad, for what it is, children will love the adorable dolphin and find the story moving and engaging, but this is not a piece for cynical adults. Despite the movie’s attempt to delve into darker waters, with the return of a solider from Iraq, even the movie’s handling of this is rather generic and predictable. The film ends with images of the real Winter and her various prosthetics. Also pictures of real-life amputee’s who have since been to visit her in the Aquarium are shown.