Review of “Aquamarine”
This is a Cinderella-from-the-sea story filmed in Australia that will fill a gap for its intended audience - those ‘tween girls (8-14 year olds), for whom summer holidays still means girlfriends, bikes, and dreaming about boys who seem to be permanently just out of reach.
Claire (Emma Roberts) and Hailey (Joanna ‘JoJo’ Levesque) are 13-year-olds who live on the Florida coast. They are best friends with a terrible crush on Raymond the hunky lifeguard and, having studied him from a distance, know all his moves, likes and dislikes. But Hailey is about to relocate to Australia and this summer holiday will be their last together, unless a miracle happens. Enter Aquamarine (Sara Paxton), a Barbie-like mermaid washed into Claire’s swimming pool one stormy night. As with Ron Howard’s 1984 movie Splash, this mermaid is able to transform her scaly below-the-waist zone into legs by day, providing her the opportunity to join Claire and Hailey in their girly pastimes – boning up on the latest boy-bagging techniques from teen magazines, and shopping. But Aquamarine has a deadline – she must find love in three days or be forced to marry according to the wishes of her powerful (but unexplained) sea father. So Claire and Hailey become her guides in this new world of dating, helping her to fend off the opposition which comes in the form of the bitchy Cecilia (Arielle Kebbel) and her catty sidekicks. In the darker background, creepy resort janitor Leonard (Bruce Spence) is picking up clues as to the real identity of Aquamarine.
After a promising set up, the film steadily sinks into silliness and slushiness, and ultimately rams home its rather trite message about true love with all the subtlety of a torpedo. Bruce Spence gives the rest of the rather light and frothy cast a lesson in acting and, apart from the cleverly blue production design, there’s nothing particularly spectacular in the cinematography or direction. No doubt this film was made for the DVD shelves. The script is based on a book of the same name by Alice Hoffman – the story of a teen friendship the author had when she was a girl of the same age as the two leads. Hoffman writes about the special intensity that is experienced at this crucial age – when life, love and loss take on heightened meanings. The film opts for an easier, breezier take on the theme and misses the opportunity to say anything beyond the obvious.
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