Turtle: The Incredible Journey

Product Description Turtle: The Incredible Journey is a critically-praised, award-winning film that follows the life and migration of a loggerhead turtle from hatching to maturity and a return to its original Florida nesting grounds. The loggerhead turtle, a threatened species, has one of the longest and most difficult migratory patterns of any marine animal: Sea turtles newly hatched on the East Coast of the United States (usually in Florida) make their way from the sand into the ocean, and then begin a voyage that can span the entire Atlantic Ocean, only to return decades later to that same beach. Review A solitary long-distance traveler with prehistoric cachet, the loggerhead turtle makes a compelling subject for a nature film, as the spectacularly shot, aptly named Turtle: The Incredible Journey demonstrates, if at times too feverishly. Director Nick Stringer has availed himself of up-to-the-minute technology and old-school storytelling -- the kind with just a touch of anthropomorphizing but, mercifully, no character names -- to capture the arc of the marine reptile's first 25 years. It's a migration from Florida to the North Atlantic, Africa, the Caribbean and back to the place of birth to lay eggs. The film is fact-packed and kid-friendly yet filled with danger; only one in 10,000 turtles completes that round trip. The peril begins the moment the sand-encrusted hatchlings emerge, soft-shelled and toothless, to make their vulnerable scuttle to the sea. Via miniature high-def cameras, the documentary captures their race against predatory crabs with extraordinary immediacy. For the rest of the trip, Stringer creates a composite portrait, seamlessly supplementing his in-the-wild footage with digital effects and studio scenes using rescued turtles. Attempting to amplify the drama but instead calling attention to themselves are an unyielding score and narration that tints toward purple, delivered with mellifluous authority by Miranda Richardson. Yet the film's conservation pitches are subdued; this is no galvanizing doc like The Cove. Charting the peregrinations of one of Earth's elders -- a creature that has navigated the seas for 200 million years, and is now endangered --Incredible Journey makes some missteps, but never falters in showing that the loggerhead's survival matters. --The Los Angeles Times The trailer for Turtle: The Incredible Journey promises more excitement than you might suspect could be packed into a story about loggerhead turtles, a plucky seafarer with high mileage. Since it played at the Toronto International Film Festival, where it was in the documentary lineup, the movie has picked up plenty of goodwill and awards. Last year its director of photography, Rory McGuinness, won a wildlife/nature award from the Australian Cinematographers Society. Given the quality of their work, the special-effects wizards who whipped up some visual wow for the movie, including computer-generated imagery, deserve a share of the applause too. The journey of the loggerhead turtle is, by any measure, an amazing life voyage, one that here reaches from the beaches of Florida to the eerie calm of the Sargasso Sea and the watery speedway known as the Gulf Stream before heading to Africa and then the call of motherhood. It s a trip that eats up thousands of miles, takes some two dozen years and is fraught with dangers, though sometimes in the movie that threat may be more imaginary than actual, as when a basking shark, the second largest fish in the world, cruises by with its weird wide mouth open, yawning in water and prey. Armed with little teeth, the basking shark feeds on krill and plankton, but its size and cavernous mouth do make for dramatic viewing. And there s plenty of nail-biting tension in Turtle: The Incredible Journey, including in the melodramatic voice-over by Miranda Richardson, so much that you may find yourself volubly rooting for the animal, or she as Ms. Richardson calls the movie s ostensible single turtl
ASIN: B005CRDG8E
VSKU: KDV.B005CRDG8E.G
Condition: Good