12/14/2022 0 Comments The loneliest whale![]() ![]() The crew manages to stick cameras on the backs of various whales they’re tracking, but the resulting footage conveys neither the sheer size or majesty of the animals. ![]() Nobody will mistake this for an Attenborough documentary, nor does it contain the natural wonder found in last year’s Oscar-winner My Octopus Teacher, which was similarly focused on an individual sea creature. Meanwhile, those hoping for lush underwater photography and magnificent images of whales will be disappointed. This isn’t to say the sentiment isn’t wonderful, especially coming out of pandemic isolation, but the film has to reach to get there. Meanwhile, the film’s ‘surprising’ final message portends to be a life-is-more-beautiful-than-fiction epiphany, but in reality it’s more of a contrived failsafe option that had to be pulled when the results were seemingly not exactly what the crew wanted. The loneliest whale movie#We are repeatedly reminded that he only has 7 days to achieve his goal or he will never have another shot, but the ‘race against time’ element isn’t convincing enough to draw much tension (apart from a well-edited climactic scramble), and the movie ultimately undermines the importance of this time limit. The film never effectively makes a case for what the world will lose if Zeman misses his chance to capture footage of 52. Oddly, the film’s dramatic backbone - Zeman’s voyage to locate the 52-hertz whale - is its least compelling component. Why exactly did Zeman devote so much time and energy to this undertaking? Apart from a not-particularly persuasive snippet in the middle of the film where he explains he, too, has felt loneliness, the more reasonable but less poetic explanation is that he simply thought it would make for an interesting movie. This beautifully tragic legend earned him the label ‘the loneliest whale in the world’ and the adoration of those who feel a similar disconnect from everyone around them.įilmmaker Joshua Zeman spent the last several years searching for the elusive behemoth, and chronicles this quest in his ambitious new documentary, The Loneliest Whale: The Search for 52. The creature’s unusual sonic signature seemingly renders him unable to communicate with others of his species, forcing him to roam the ocean on his own. Since his initial detection by oceanographers in 1989, a single whale that drones at an anomalous 52-hertz frequency has captured the imaginations of lonely souls across the globe. ![]()
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