Morning Light is a documentary about a group of young adults who take a shot at the 44th TransPac (the Transpacific Yacht Race). It's a particularly grueling contest -- a 2,500-mile sprint from Los Angeles to the Diamond Head Buoy in Honolulu, Hawaii. Unlike in many competition-based documentaries, actually winning the race is set as a side-goal; the real rewards are the life lessons gained through the conquering of some potentially dangerous odds. The most interesting thing about Morning Light (and what damages it the most) is that only about half of it is focused on the actual race.
Ironically enough, I found Morning Light's most entertaining parts to be off the water. While many of the emotional and physical struggles depicted are cliched at best, they certainly feel real and believable. First off, these people were not professionals when this movie was made; they are not Grade-A sailors (when the wind dies down and the boat skims to a near-halt, one of the sailors literally asks his teammate, "Are we effed?").
It's also interesting to watch these starry-eyed college kids struggle to earn their places on the actual racing team, which is no easy task. Watching one of the unconditioned rookies struggle to tread water in his clothes and sharing in the disappointment of an ill-timed injury should trigger an empathic response in anyone. The tension surrounding the teammates who know they need to cut some people loose is also captured pretty well. All of that being said, by the time the film is over, you might only remember one of the sailors' names (two or three if you're really good).
I'm extremely torn on the ways in which Morning Light was filmed. For every single beautiful shot of the schooner cutting across the clear cerulean of the Pacific, there are three shots of high-speed montage insanity, redundant displays of computer imagery, and pointless shots taken from nausea-inducing camera angles. It's really bizarre to watch what is supposed to be a documentary when a random computer-generated shooting star blazes across the night sky above the Morning Light. I almost forgot to mention the often irritating music that has been mixed into what should have been free of unnecessary noise.
At the beginning of Morning Light, it is made explicitly clear that sailboat racing is a passion of producer and TransPac veteran Roy E. Disney (yes, that Roy E. Disney). His involvement in this documentary is well-established, which gave me a lot more respect for the movie than I would have if he stayed out of the camera's way. This movie is clearly a labor of love, and I feel bad for being harsh on it for not really being all that entertaining to the average movie buff. Therefore, I will end with this double-edged criticism: Morning Light chronicles an intriguing story that is simply out of its element as a film. In all honesty, I think it would have fared far better with around sixty-percent of itself on the editing room floor and the rest of it on the Disney Channel.
