The blue whale, this giant of the seas, is an endangered species. Overhunted for too long, it may be protected, but its meat can be found on Japanese markets. It may be immense, but it is no match for ever-larger, ever more numerous ships. Protecting them is a challenge that a certain number of specialists are trying to meet. A team of three of them, featured in the film, spend several weeks in the Santa Barbara Channel, one of the blue whale's larders. Their objective? To discover the place where they give birth to their calves, thereby establishing the route they follow so that they can better protect them in the future.
This is what "The Kingdom of the Blue Whale" undertakes to illustrate, but it does not do it in the way of a classic documentary, which is a good idea insofar as 1 hour and 33 minutes of pure pedagogy might well be tiring!. To avoid boredom, Sue Houghton, the director, has in fact had the excellent idea to resort to the thriller form . How does she go about getting the spectator hooked (pun intended)? Well, a riddle is asked at a time (for example: will the three specialists be able to locate the spot where the blue whale will give birth to its calf?) but the key to the puzzle will not be given before a number of twists and turns have happened to the protagonists. Such is the task assigned to he narrator, Tom Selleck ( no less): he duly asks a question with an unknown answer, tension builds up and interest is kept sustained. Among the other suspense-inducing questions: where do the whales go when they leave the Santa Barbara Canal ? Why so many dead whales ? Why can blue whale meat still be found on certain Japanese markets while the species is protected, will our three heroes succeed in filming for the first time the birth of a whale calf) ?
The advantage of this method is that it makes the medicine go down easily, despite the film's unusual length and for all its redundancies, banalities or filling scenes. To say nothing of the music, which is regrettably all-purpose. But as the whole is well filmed and very interesting from a documentary point of view, the small flaws noted will not prevent you from thinking that the time spent in the company of these benevolent hunters and peaceful monsters was not wasted.
