Big Miracle

Review by Pete Roche

Ken Kwapis (TV’s The Office) worked with both John Krasinski and Drew Barrymore in the dramedies LICENSE TO WED and HE’S JUST NOT THAT INTO YOU.  Now the filmmaker brings his favorite stars together for BIG MIRACLE, an environmental feel-gooder about a multinational effort to free a family of California Gray whales trapped under ice in Point Barrow, Alaska, in October 1988.  Based on the real-life “Operation Breakthrough,” and utilizing a script adapted from the Tom Rose book Freeing the Whales, BIG MIRACLE is less about the Cetaceans themselves than the improbable chain of events and culturally at-odds people who set aside their differences to liberate them.