Big Miracle—Lucky Whales Cheat Natural Selection

Imagine a community hustled into saving a man who’d gone swimming in an iron bathing suit?

There, you have a neat summary of this film.

For the second week in a row we examine a movie set in Alaska.

Last week’s The Grey was actually filmed in British Columbia because the snow there was cheaper. However Big Miracle found a suitable location in the Last Frontier for its tale of trapped gray—or grey?— whales and the con job they inflict on a community of gullible people.

In the waning Cold War days of October 1988, Adam Carlson (John Krasinski) is a reporter doing back country stories in far north Barrow, Alaska.

He learns three gray whales have become trapped in ice.

Carlson’s efforts to free the whales eventually involve his environmentalist ex-girlfriend Rachel Kramer (Drew Barrymore), Inuit whalers, the National Guard, an oil executive’s wife and, finally, a Soviet icebreaker.

Director Ken Kwapis does an excellent job of showing the whales as intelligent beings. And like many intelligent beings, the whales know a sucker when they see one. By opening their big, damp eyes really wide, the whales successfully dupe humans with a helpless shtick that works better than peanut butter in a rattrap.

The script by Jack Amiel, Michael Begler and Thomas Rose (based on his book, Freeing the Whales) subtlety underscores the brutal fact that natural selection had chosen the whales to perish for their haplessness in getting trapped. But instead, using their blubber-fueled wiles, they manipulate humans into investing time and energy FREEING THEM.

And do the whales pause in their awesome smartness and thank everyone?

Do they rise out of the sea and wave a fin in farewell?

Why bother. They quickly bolt their icy prison to California waters, leaving the Barrow residents huddling in the dark of an Arctic winter, mulling over being chumped by mud-eating baleens.

Rachel Kramer sums it up best when she says, “Whales are no different than people—overweight, inarticulate and they’ll spit if you get too close.”

Three stars for excellent work by the set painter gang boss and set decoration buyer.