Turtle: The Incredible Journey

SeaWorld’s Sea Turtle documentary, Turtle: The Incredible Journey , debuts in Orlando on June 24.

The documentary is directed by National Geographic Explorer’s Nick Stringer and distributed by SeaWorld Pictures.

The film, narrated by Academy Award nominee Miranda Richardson, follows the loggerhead turtle on an adventure of more than 9,000 miles guided only by instinct 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.

Stringer and his camera crew spent two years following loggerhead turtles on their trips across the ocean, and have captured on film the remarkable life cycle of a beautiful creature that struggles to survive in an increasingly unforgiving environment.

The film is debuting Friday, June 24th in Orlando at Pointe Orlando and Oviedo Marketplace. Check listings for show times.

Turtle: The Incredible Journey Movie Review

Two hundred million years ago, turtles were exclusively creatures of the land. Though their ancestors were driven into the oceans by the predatory prowess of dinosaurs, even today loggerhead turtles retain the unusual practice of birthing their young on the beach, setting the scene for one of the most amazing and improbable stories of new life on Earth. Narrated by Miranda Richardson, director Nick Stringer’s Turtle: The Incredible Journey charts this fascinating tale, and does so in a fashion as visually captivating as it is informative.

The product of more than two years of filming, Turtle opens on a beach in Florida, where we witness buried hatchlings finally burst through the sand into daylight, after almost three days of struggling blindly upward. What follows is astounding, as these delicate babies — no bigger than the palm of a child’s hand, and still soft-shelled – instinctively make their way to the sea, past a maze of hungry crabs and swooping pelicans. If they’re lucky enough to make it that far, the swirling surf batters and knocks them around, while they struggle to make it past the breaking waves and out to calmer waters. Fifty miles of nonstop swimming awaits, where they then try to hook on to a patch of seaweed that will finally afford them their first living sleep, and hopefully get picked up by the Gulf Stream, carrying them further north. Watching this unfold, it’s easy to understand why the mortality rate for loggerhead turtles is 50 percent in the first several hours of their above-ground existence.

A lot of nature documentaries aim for elegant absorption, unfolding in a mannered style at a delicate remove. But Stringer’s movie, with its intense, close-up cinematography and smart framing and editorial choices, unfolds as an almost entirely subjective experience. The result is invigorating, particularly in its first third, which comes across like the animal kingdom equivalent of storming the beaches at Normandy. With each new hurdle these baby turtles face alone — from the aforementioned predators to the perils of the stagnant Sargasso Sea, devoid of currents or winds — one’s appreciation of their indomitable spirit increases by multiple factors.

Perhaps most impressively, Stringer doesn’t let the style of his telling overwhelm the material, or cloud his instinct for narrative. Melanie Finn’s script for Richardson’s narration nicely juggles the difficulties of making the stories of these turtles palatable for different age groups, all without pandering or sacrificing factual context, as DisneyNature’s African Cats did earlier this year. And it undercuts not one iota the visceral and emotional charge of, say, seeing a baby loggerhead turtle struggle with trying to digest plastic jetsam, get hooked by a commercial fishing line, or barely escape the clutches of a Portuguese man-of-war. All of these moments, and many more, are amazingly captured by Stringer and cinematographer Rory McGuinness, leading one to believe that select 3-D presentations of the film might be an even more rewarding experience.

Turtle: The Incredible Journey: Film Review

Turtle: The Incredible Journey, made by veteran wildlife documenarians under the direction of Nick Stringer, follows the life and underwater travels of a single creature of the sea, a female loggerhead turtle, which has a one-in-10,000 chance to survive its journey. This journey, as is the case of so many wildlife docs these days, offers the opportunity for the filmmakers to make a plea on behalf of endangered species and to explore ecological issues, in this case what’s happening in the earth’s oceans under threat from over-fishing and global warming.

It looks like this film has taken its own arduous journey on the film festival/market circuit, where the odds may be only slightly better than that of the loggerhead. The film took two years to make and the print screened for review bore a 2008 copyright date. The film is now getting a modest release June 24 in Los Angeles, New York and near three primary SeaWorld locations via SeaWorld Pictures and Hannover House.

Since a Russian distributor spent the money to convert the film to 3D, the U.S. release in some locations will be in 3D. This review is based on a conventional print.

A loggerhead turtle is born literally buried alive in sand. Digging itself to the surface of a beach in Florida, the tiny creature must scramble for the water a few meters away across a war zone where prey such as ghost crabs and pelicans close in to devour these newborn.

If the turtle makes it to the water, strong currents carry the baby for up to three days before she reaches the Gulf Stream. (The filmmakers have a heroine since this will better illustrate the circle of life for these turtles.)

At this point, survival rate is about 50 percent. Things get worse.

She drifts at no more than five-miles-per-hour in sargassum weed, a plant that floats in the ocean, on her journey north. This film imagines she drifts seriously off-course, out of the Gulf Stream and into the doldrums of the Sargasso Sea. Here she is caught for five years.

Eventually, the movie’s heroine relocates the Gulf Stream, swims the north Atlantic for years from the freezing north to the Azores, then heads back to the Caribbean, 9,000 miles guided only by instincts inherited from ancestors going back millions of years. Hazards include blue sharks and jellyfish but also man, whose fishing nets and long lines catch and kill countless loggerheads.

The crew headed by cinematographer Rory McGuiness captures the hatchlings emerging on that Florida beach along with rare footage of juvenile turtles in the Azores and a brilliant shot of two turtles in a mating embrace. Adult turtles were filmed in the Florida Keys and the Caribbean but many scenes were filmed with rescued turtles in a specially built marine studio. Shots of the tiny turtle hitching a ride in the sargassum weed were recreated there as well.

So the film features amazing cinematography both underwater and on the ocean surface. But it does suffer from a treacly narration and overly dramatic music that pitch the movie more to young school children than interested adults. At least the filmmakers forgo giving their heroine a name, which another recent wildlife doc did with its wildlife “characters.”

The loggerhead turtle’s journey is indeed incredible. But you would rather the narration, delivered intelligently by Miranda Rwichardson, didn’t feel a need to remind you of this fact so frequently.

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