**** Spoiler alert! This review reveals the major plot elements of the film Soul Surfer.

Soul Surfer (2011, distributed by TriStar films) is based on the real-life story of surfer Bethany Hamilton – a young Hawaiian surfer who was headed for a promising career as a women's professional surfer. She just got an endorsement deal, and things were looking up. However, when she was 13 years old, a 14-foot tiger shark bit off her arm while she was surfing with some friends. The first quarter of the film details her life before the shark attack. While the last part of the film details her physical and mental recovery from the trauma of losing an arm, and her return into the world of women's professional surfing.

I saw Soul Surfer in a movie theater on April 17, 2011. If you go into this movie expecting it to be A-list quality, don't. It is definitely a well-made movie, and is worth seeing, but it has its issues. For example...

Preachiness: I'm not anti-Christian, and I don't mind the occasional religious reference or material, but if you're like me, an adult who is not extremely religious, then I suggest avoiding the first 10 minutes of the previews. The movie previews are heavy on Christian preachy family-togetherness stuff. These previews were obviously geared toward young children, but if you're an adult you might find such goody-two-shoes previews too wholesome and offputting. I mention the previews for a reason. There were about 8 previews, and previews can ruin a good movie—just like a bad appetizer can take away from a good meal and hurt the dining experience. Now as for Soul Surfer itself, the film shows protagonist Bethany Hamilton is religious, and so that faith must be a part of the film to tell her story. But here again, the religious tone seemed preachy and a little too much. Hamilton is portrayed as being an enthusiastic part of a youth ministry. They are singing a Praise-the-Lord type of song, which can be offputting to many people. Although some viewers could relate to this enthusiasm because they are themselves very religious, I think the average viewer would be feel a little bit overwhelmed by the religiosity. In fact, the excessive religiosity might deter some people from enjoying what is an otherwise very interesting storyline. Maybe dial back the religion from an 8 down to a 2, please, for the sake of the mainstream viewer.

Directing/Producing: This film worked, and I liked it, but this is a movie review after all, and the directing by Sean McNamara wasn't perfect. It's hard to know whether the budget of the film prevented the producers from finding better extras, or taking the time to get more out of them. Often times, the extras are what turns a great movie into a mediocre one. The director definitely had a good idea of how to pace and edit the film, and how to tell a story. The emotional connection was definitely communicated by the director. But particularly irritating were the parts when Bethany was in an airport waiting to go to Thailand for a Christian ministry outreach trip after a tsunami. The extras are seen nodding and smiling about Bethany's decision to go on the trip, but the extras were too intense and smiling too much, and that subtracted from the realism (remember the Christianity part above). Next, when Bethany is shown in Thailand, the Thai extras were poorly directed, and poorly-framed to account for their sub-par acting ability. This Thailand sequence was one of the strongest emotional parts, because it's where Bethany realized that her loss of an arm was not as great as someone losing an entire family in a natural disaster. Still, these two Thailand-related sequences were not crafted as well as the rest of the film, and could easily have been removed without much loss to the overall story.

In the final quarter of Soul Surfer, Bethany decides to re-enter the water and return to competitive surfing. The surf contest scene had a bunch of extras who were not professional actors. I guess it's hard to find a lot of good professional Hawaiian-actors, but their scenes could have been framed differently to compensate. Anyone who's seen the TV show Hawaii Five-O can understand what I mean about the relative lack of good ethnic Hawaiian actors. A better director could have used these Hawaiians differently.

Acting: For good acting . . . Helen Hunt played Hamilton's mother, and Hunt was by far the best performer in the whole film. I've admired her acting since I saw Castaway. In fact, Hunt was so good, that she outshone all the other performers, and kind of highlighted their relative lack of acting ability. This contrast in acting quality just emphasized the fact that Soul Surfer won't win the Academy-Award for best picture. Hunt was that much better than the other performers. One part of the film even echoed the movie Castaway. In Castaway, Hunt's character drops a phone when she learns of her husband's return to America after long being thought dead. A similar phone-drop happens in Soul Surfer where Bethany's mom (played by Hunt) drops a telephone when she learns of her daughter's shark injury. This film's level would have suffered greatly without Hunt.

Dennis Quaid played Bethany Hamilton's father. Quaid's best scene was a humorous one where he gave his daughter a crafty surfboard that better allowed her to navigate the big Hawaiian waves with one arm. Hamilton's family reluctantly relents from ribbing the Dad about his past fixer-upper attempts, and calls the father a "genius."

Pop singer Carrie Underwood was cast as the Christian youth-ministry preacher, Sarah Hill, a mentor of Bethany's. Although Underwood is pretty and captivating, her performance was stiff and showed that she is maybe better off singing than acting.

The two young male actors who played Hamilton's brothers were also good and consistent in their acting ability.

Then there's the actress playing Bethany Hamilton (AnaSophia Robb), who got off to a rocky start early in the film. It seemed as if she was 'warming up.' By the end of the film, however, her performance started to become more polished and convincing. She was a pretty actress and a good surfer too, which made it easy to watch her.

Shark Attack. The shark attack scene wasn't gory. You see the computer-animated shark jump above the water and bite through the surfboard and Bethany's arm in a split-second, then the shark is gone. The movie isn't about the shark after all, it's about the shark attack victim, so I think they did this shark-bite scene well. Also, since the film is geared toward families and young kids, you wouldn't want to scare the pants off children! Everyone, young and old, knows the shark attack is coming – it's no secret what the movie's about, but you don't want to freak anyone out with a gory chomp scene.

Sound: the sound quality was good throughout the movie. There were no obvious glitches. It was solid sound quality (about 8/10).

Photography/Editing/SFX: The photography was quite good. The lighting of the actors wasn't weird or over-bright as can sometimes happen in sunny outdoor settings. The surfing scenes were quite pretty and enjoyable to watch. The beautiful backdrops of locations in the Hawaiian islands of Kauai and Oahu rarely give bad pictures, and this film gives them justice. Then there's that in-the-water surf-photography that has been done a million times before in surf films, and yet... it's still nice to see close-up surfing on the big screen, and a little help from the special effects department helped enhance these water scenes even more. One thing that was amazing in the film was the special effects that digitally 'removed' the actress's left arm leaving only a stump where an arm once was. I looked for any glitches in this stump effect, and couldn't find any. It reminds me of the CGI effects done on that character in Forrest Gump who lost a leg in Viet Nam. You'd never know that the real-life actress had two arms! Well done.

Music: the music score was very suitable to the film. The music presaged the shark attack early on in the film, and you half-expected the shark attack to happen right when they showed an underwater scene of several female surfers. But it was a false peak and it only built up tension for the inevitable. The shark attack happened later, toward the middle of the film. You wonder how they were going to score the music to the shark attack. Would it be ominous building up like a John Williams' crescendo – as in Spielberg's movie Jaws? Or would they find a different way to let the music enhance the shark-attack. Luckily, the latter was the case (Jaws music has already been done). In other parts of the film, there were Hawaiian ethnic singers in the background music. I've been to Hawaii, and if you've been there too, you've heard some of the authentic Hawaiian music and language, and you can appreciate how the Polynesian music and lyrics enhanced the spiritual quality of the film. That music gives a nod to a higher being, or Nature, as you view the beautiful Hawaiian landscape scenes.

Favorite Part: My favorite part of Soul Surfer was the dreamlike state where Bethany is pale from blood loss and dying in the hospital. In what seems like her last thoughts before death, she visualizes herself being in the wave's 'tube,' and the dreamy quality was beautiful. It seemed like going toward that 'white light' that people talk about who've been in near-death experiences. It was simultaneously frightening yet calm. There was a similar scene later in the film during a final surfing contest. Bethany is again surfing a mighty wave, and we see her face close-up (something that can only be managed with C.G.I.). It suggests that Bethany has returned to her element, spiritually, and re-connects to earlier in the film when her seemingly final thoughts were about something that is so important to her—surfing.

Summary: Whether the movie viewer is a surfer or not, Soul Surfer has many things to like: good location, good photography, some good acting, it's based on a real life story, and it's a good family movie. Helen Hunt's performance was top-rate, and Academy-Award Best Actress material, but unfortunately, the film that surrounds her performance is a less supportive matrix to her excellent acting. I recommend seeing Soul Surfer in a movie theater if you can, since the surfing visuals always look better on the big-screen. I'm sure it will look fine when it comes out on video too. Just don't go into this film expecting it to be the best movie ever, because it isn't. It has its deficiencies, and is at times over-religious, and sometimes amateurish, but if you can overlook those things, Soul Surfer stands on its own, and is a well-paced inspiring story that the whole family will enjoy.


Rating: 7/10

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This video was shot on a nice sunny summer day of 2007 in southern California, USA
It shows mostly longboarders.

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