Director: Jay Russell
It is possible to make a decent movie out of a children's book (just look at the Harry Potter films or "The Golden Compass") but it is crucially important to choose the right book. It has to have themes that someone above five years of age can relate to and contain elements of a coherent and interesting story.
"Water Horse" based on the book by Dick King-Smith, was almost certainly not the right one to make a movie out of. It has no conflict, no bad guys or good guys, no challenges for the protagonist to overcome and extremely limited character development. In short, it has no plot.
The story is structured around an old man telling two youngsters a story, much like "The Princess Bride" did. But where "The Princess Bride" masterfully snapped back to reality in a few short scenes, "Water Horse" is badly edited using crude cuts to the old man laughing or the kids looking enthusiastic, which only adds confusion to a story which lacks any substance in the first place.
A young boy in Scotland, Angus MacMorrow (Alex Etel), is out searching for shells one day and finds what at first appears to be a large rock, but is actually an egg. The egg soon hatches and the world's one and only water horse is born. Of course the creature isn't even remotely similar to the water horse of Celtic legend, which actually looked like a horse. Instead, it is something like a dinosaur 's made to resemble the fabled Loch Ness monster it eventually becomes.
Angus successfully hides the creature from both his mother and the battalion of soldiers stationed by his home and when it grows too large to keep at home, he throws it into the Loch.
The water horse grows up in a matter of days, takes Angus on a magical underwater journey, is shot at by the soldiers who mistake it for a Nazi submarine and finally escapes to the sea to live happily ever after, and that's it.
This film is let down by poor special effects, there are lots of shots of the cute young water horse and an imposing adult one, yet the creature doesn't look even remotely real at any point. To cap it off all the characters are as hopelessly two-dimensional as the horse is fake.
The one redeeming feature of the movie is that it has a moral: war is bad. That is honestly the only good thing about this clumsy and hollow film.
Now showing in Estonia and Latvia: opens March 21 in Lithuania
