By Richard Winters
My Rating: 3 out of 10
4-Word Review: Training dolphins to talk.
Jake Terrell (George C. Scott) along with his wife Maggie (Trish Van Devere) run a remote island research station where, along with a small team of researchers, try to teach dolphins to communicate with humans. They’re prime subject, which they’ve been working with for 4 years, is Alpha whom they’ve successfully trained to speak some English words, but when they team him up with another dolphin named Beta he goes back to his old ways of communicating and no longer speaks with Jake, or his team. Things become further hampered when Curtis (Paul Sorvino) arrives on the island supposedly under the guise of being a journalist, but in reality he’s a spy there to infiltrate what Jake has been doing with the dolphins and report back to a secret government organization who want to then use the dolphins for their own nefarious means.
With the early success of director Mike Nichols and screenwriter Buck Henry, especially The Graduate, it seemed like these two could do no wrong and they both became a much sought after Hollywood commodity and given many top project offers. This production though came crashing down horribly and stymied Nichols career, which had previously been skyrocketing, for the rest of the decade as he helmed only one other film after this during the 70’s before finally getting his reputation back in order with the critically acclaimed Silkwood.
This thing comes-off as a misfire almost immediately and the biggest problem are the dolphins. There’s just so much they can do, liking mainly jumping in and out of water, until it becomes really boring. The long dream-like segment of watching Jake swim around in the tank with the dolphin adds nothing and got so prolonged that it practically put me to sleep. The only part where the dolphins did hold my attention was when Jake decides to split the two up where Beta is put in a pool on one side and Alpha the other and a steel partition between them. This then causes the dolphins much stress as Alpha angrily smashes his tail repeatedly against the partition in anger, but to no avail. While I did find this moment to be rather intense it does backfire in a way in that it makes Jake and the other researchers seem cruel and you start to not like them, which I don’t think was the filmmaker’s intent.
Having them learn to talk was misguided and makes it seem like a silly flick for kids with no barring in reality. Initially I was okay with them learning a few words as it came-off like they were parrots repeating sounds that they had heard, so it was borderline plausible, but then having it graduate to the point that he and others can have ongoing conversations with them and even ask them questions is when it starts to get too absurd for its own good. In fact the only moment in the film that’s truly fascinating to see is when a mother dolphin gives birth using actual footage, which made me believe this would’ve been better off had it been done as a documentary and the fictional story left out completely.
Sorvino does add some energy with his scenes and pretty much outclasses Scott, who with his $750,000 salary, which would equate to $5,484,886 in today’s dollars, is quite dull and he manages to get completely upstaged by even the dolphins themselves. All of the main characters are quite one-dimensional, especially Van Devere who seems to agree with Scott on everything and echoes whatever point-of-view he has making her presence completely unneccesary as she’s simply him in a female form.
Having one of the research crew members turn out to being a spy doesn’t work either as the viewer is given no forewarning about this. We’re just informed later that this individual had betrayed them, but a good movie should offer hints upfront that a traitor may be in their midst and thus allow the audience to become more of an active participant as they try and figure out which of them it is. The secret government organization thing gets equally botched. A better scenario would’ve had a former friend, or associate to Jake turn on him and seek revenge by trying to destroy the research facility and all of their findings. He would be constantly lurking about, which would’ve added more ongoing tension that is otherwise lacking and given the bad guy more of a personality versus the bland government agents that are too generic to be either frightening, or memorable.
My Rating: 3 out of 10
Released: December 19, 1973
Runtime: 1 Hour 44 Minutes
Rated PG
Director: Mike Nichols
Studio: AVCO Embassy Pictures
Available: DVD, Blu-ray
Scopophilia 