Packed with subplots, politics and propaganda, the ecology movie Big Miracle is a big fish tale based on a true story from 1988. This Universal picture is brazenly loaded with more conflicts of interest than a politician, sprinkling in-bred spots from Comcast-owned NBC Universal’s other entertainment company, NBC News, whose presence in the film blatantly contradicts the anti-corporate theme. The movie manages to generate excitement in spite of itself.
The plot defies description but there are numerous forces that supposedly act in their self-interest to save three whales trapped under the ice near Barrow, Alaska. The incendiary spark is an unethical environmentalist (Drew Barrymore) who will do anything to achieve her ends and makes no bones about it. Part of the problem with Big Miracle is that it doesn’t know when it’s undercutting its ecological propaganda. It must be noted that children should not be exposed to this movie without a thorough grounding in the facts of nature, followed by a sober discussion about whether it’s moral to sacrifice humans to animals as the film repeatedly advocates.
But frankly half the fun is seeing multiple articles of leftist faith eviscerated; whether the tribe that hunts the mammals for its livelihood is subjugated to people who blindly follow the dogma that the individual and the collective – heck, anything human – must be subordinated to the whales. Besides the prospect of Ms. Barrymore’s Greenpeace activist being swatted to death and a helicopter full of humans deliberately being frozen to death, there are countless instances in which men, women and children are put at risk of death for the sake of the gray whales. Among the selfless are John Krasinski (Jarhead) as an affable local news reporter, Ted Danson as an oil titan married to a closeted Greenpeace accomplice (Kathy Baker), a cute tribal kid, a couple of dolts from Minnesota, a governor, a White House aide, competing reporters, tribesmen and village people and, of course, all of them are willing to risk death to save the whales. The most driven character is played by Dermot Mulroney as a National Guardsman. None of their efforts exactly succeeds but, lo and behold, Big Miracle saves the best for last, delivering ecologically inclined Communists who save the day with a Soviet icebreaker that takes us beyond moral equivalency and tops the Americans with a greater sense of duty to the whales, which are trapped by rapidly forming ice in the Arctic Circle.
Somehow, through the nonsense and preposterous or horrid themes and ideas – men are bad, white men are worse, productive white men are the worst – Big Miracle depicts townspeople coming together to make a profit off the media-hyped event, careers being made by the tragedy in the making, leftists clawing their way to the top much more voraciously than the capitalists, and, above all, that which is manmade conquering nature in order to suit man’s chosen purpose. That the machines serve an arguably irrational purpose – one person questions why the whales deserve more attention than the 30 wars on the planet – is emphatically not the point. Big Miracle is mystical about worshipping non-man on earth, complete with men on their knees in prayer – with entire families passively sitting on couches consuming food, entranced by the TV spectacle, as if in church, temple or mosque – but at least it shows, however accidentally, that what is truly miraculous is actually what is manmade.