Something about the style of this movie totally grated on my sense of taste right from the start. The misleading movie poster showed a wooden pirate ship, but what the audience gets is a modern cruise ship full of very overweight, aged tourists: a slight difference there (sarcasm intended), and no chance for any eye candy. Both the pet lizard and pet pelican of the girl squawked like parrots, which was ridiculous and was of course just done by a human voice faking a parrot to make it even worse.
The story was totally predictable: woman writer overcomes her agoraphobia and rescues the little girl in distress, single father becomes enamored with the lady at the end, there is the obligatory collection of animals and one fart joke for the child audience, the father finds exactly the plankton he has been looking for, the pouty little girl has a change of heart and helps out the lady at the end, and so on.
It looked as if the story was intended to be humorous, but it wasn't, especially the treadmill scene, which by unfortunate coincidence was the same gag used in an animated trailer before this movie began, which destroyed the novelty. The acting was horribly unrealistic everywhere: the overly enthusiastic kid, the overly wonderful father, the overly phobic writer. The intro and ending scenes with the cheap cardboard cutouts with CGI scenery were ugly, weird, and perplexing: that all comes across as a money-saving device, looking like the filmmakers were too cheap to film a real woman on a real boat to tell the background history.
Too much of the film was so far-fetched: that through all the girl's falls her pet lizard would never get squashed, that nobody would wonder how lizards could fly fifty feet through the air to land on the beach, how a volcano could start erupting but then conveniently stop in time for the family get-together at the end, why an antenna underwater would be accompanied by gurgling audio sounds, why the sailor father would not realize a storm was hitting as soon as it started to rain, why they wouldn't have storm shutters on their house, that a woman in modern times would be swallowed by a whale, that a pelican could carry an entire loaded tool belt for miles across the ocean, and so on. The CGI turtle underwater looked fake, as did the three CGI circling sharks. The excessive political correctness (most people won't notice where this occurred, and I'm not going to enlighten you) was appalling to me, as well. And what's with the girl eating a plate of live worms? An island like that would have plentiful fish within easy reach, so that intentional gross-out meal was ridiculously unrealistic, especially that the worms were uncooked and still squirming. And why didn't the filmmakers take the trouble to do a ghostly fade-out of the presence of the adventurer who kept talking to the author in her imagination, instead of having him swim off in order to get him out of the scene? That seemed to show additional laziness or cheapness on the filmmakers' part. I was annoyed with this film from the very start: I kept wondering why I wasn't enjoying it and I kept telling myself it had to get better or more interesting, but it never did.
What makes this all so surprising is that all the backgrounds and themes should have been great: the wonderful setting on a tropical island, a paradisiacal hideaway on the island, the oceanographer mother and father, the perfect childhood with several exotic pets and no school, pirates, nice decor with coral and hanging shells, and so on. To take such an appealing foundation and still ruin the movie takes some real skill. Awful!
The story was totally predictable: woman writer overcomes her agoraphobia and rescues the little girl in distress, single father becomes enamored with the lady at the end, there is the obligatory collection of animals and one fart joke for the child audience, the father finds exactly the plankton he has been looking for, the pouty little girl has a change of heart and helps out the lady at the end, and so on.
It looked as if the story was intended to be humorous, but it wasn't, especially the treadmill scene, which by unfortunate coincidence was the same gag used in an animated trailer before this movie began, which destroyed the novelty. The acting was horribly unrealistic everywhere: the overly enthusiastic kid, the overly wonderful father, the overly phobic writer. The intro and ending scenes with the cheap cardboard cutouts with CGI scenery were ugly, weird, and perplexing: that all comes across as a money-saving device, looking like the filmmakers were too cheap to film a real woman on a real boat to tell the background history.
Too much of the film was so far-fetched: that through all the girl's falls her pet lizard would never get squashed, that nobody would wonder how lizards could fly fifty feet through the air to land on the beach, how a volcano could start erupting but then conveniently stop in time for the family get-together at the end, why an antenna underwater would be accompanied by gurgling audio sounds, why the sailor father would not realize a storm was hitting as soon as it started to rain, why they wouldn't have storm shutters on their house, that a woman in modern times would be swallowed by a whale, that a pelican could carry an entire loaded tool belt for miles across the ocean, and so on. The CGI turtle underwater looked fake, as did the three CGI circling sharks. The excessive political correctness (most people won't notice where this occurred, and I'm not going to enlighten you) was appalling to me, as well. And what's with the girl eating a plate of live worms? An island like that would have plentiful fish within easy reach, so that intentional gross-out meal was ridiculously unrealistic, especially that the worms were uncooked and still squirming. And why didn't the filmmakers take the trouble to do a ghostly fade-out of the presence of the adventurer who kept talking to the author in her imagination, instead of having him swim off in order to get him out of the scene? That seemed to show additional laziness or cheapness on the filmmakers' part. I was annoyed with this film from the very start: I kept wondering why I wasn't enjoying it and I kept telling myself it had to get better or more interesting, but it never did.
What makes this all so surprising is that all the backgrounds and themes should have been great: the wonderful setting on a tropical island, a paradisiacal hideaway on the island, the oceanographer mother and father, the perfect childhood with several exotic pets and no school, pirates, nice decor with coral and hanging shells, and so on. To take such an appealing foundation and still ruin the movie takes some real skill. Awful!