The fact that I felt compelled to put the number 1 in the title means they made a few of these movies. Which equally means this has to of been a box-office success to spawn all the following movies. This was created on a budget of $20m and then released in 1993, it made $153.6m there after so to my rather poor mathematical mind is a +700% profit so this has to be a Warner Brothers classic doesn’t it. It starred Jason James Richter, Keiko, Lori Petty, Jayne Atkinson, August Schellenberg & Michael Madsen. It also had songs from Michael Jackson on it which went on to win awards everywhere. Jason Richter plays the main character Jesse a foster child who befriends a captive Killer Whale called Willy.
Onto plot if the previous sentence has not given it away already. Jesse is a troubled orphan who is causing problems of a criminal damage and theft point of view. His real mother is not interested in him and abandoned him six years ago. To save him from the punishment his social worker puts him into a foster home and enforces that he cleans up the theme park he left his graffiti mark. He is sent to a foster-parents called Annie and Glen Greenwood where Jesse’s attitude is still not great. When cleaning up the park he comes into contact with Willy a Killer Whale (Orca to me) who was captured and placed in this giant swimming pool. He is clearly pining to be free whilst his pod wants him back as well. Jesse and Willy have a connection straight away and the owner of the park sees that these two together could finally bring in some money. He offers Jesse a job and the friends are united. This gives Jesse a purpose and he is even starting to warm to his foster parents as well. They come up with the Willy Show and Jesse is set for his first show when Willy gets freaked out by kids bashing on the glass and smashes the glass causing a panic and the tank to leak. Realising that should the tank be unfixable and the whale dies it means they get $1m from the insurance company. They don’t need to fix the problem that well. What can Jesse do to save the whale? How is that for a set up for you to go and watch?
I enjoyed the first version of Free Willy enough to give it a 74% score but the other scorers were not so enthusiastic about it with IMDb giving it 6/10 and Rotten Tomatoes coming extremely close with 58% so it is not quite as well liked as I thought it was. This could be because the principle of the film is to say that captive whales are a bad idea as you are keeping a wild animal in a small pool aware from its natural ocean. Which is a great message but then you realise that the movie is using a real whale for the shoot then Keiko the whale is a living creature being kept in captivity and now being filmed for a movie. This resulted in a completely different story of how the film studio set up a charity to support and find a better home for the actual whale before it was released back into the wild in 2002. By then the franchise had released two more movies by then. The orca was dead long before the fourth movie was released. I guess the problem is to promote a movie and it will be a hard sell to you to say this is a good movie go watch it when the principle creature involved died as a result of human interreference completely through its life! Good movie though go see it.
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