Like one of those monsters from mythology made up of disparate creatures, like a griffin or a centaur or a Horis, “;Morning Light”; is mismatched parts nailed together and somehow breathed into life. It's interesting that it moves at all, but the fact that it's moving at all is kind of scary.

It's a reality show disguised as a documentary, a notion that undercuts the concept of both. Reality shows lurch forward on the force of personality of the principals, and once that's established, the dramatic edginess comes from watching the characters deal with the unexpected. A documentary supposedly either views the subject dispassionately, or it edits the raw reality captured on film into a personal commentary.

“;Morning Light”; takes 15 young people and plops them into a sailboat, where they train for a while and then participate in a race. It exists primarily because entertainment mogul Roy Disney is a sailing enthusiast, primarily of the famed TransPac California-to-Hawaii sprint. From the first frame, the arc of the story is predetermined, and no expense is spared to create exactly the movie they wanted to make from the first pitch meeting. No inconvenient reality to mess with their marketing. This is an hour and a half of advertising, not a documentary.

The kids all seem very nice and goal-oriented and capable and smart and up-with-people. It's a church picnic with the Teen Club. What we'd give for a Kenley!

Roy Disney shows up every once in a while, like an avuncular Gandalf, to sprinkle money on the project and then vanish. Various sailing pros also make cameo appearances, but it's really all about the kids. Although there's no adult on board, don't expect a frat party. The TransPac is a grueling forced march of a race, more than 2,000 miles across the blankest canvas on the planet, and generally, the boats never lay eyes on each other. That the Morning Light crew go neck-and-neck in the midst of the ocean with their primary competition must have thrilled the editors, but it frazzled the kids.

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An example: Much is made in the early stages of the film about how dangerous the race is. Falling overboard is considered a death sentence, so says Uncle Roy solemnly. During a training exercise to recover a lost shipmate in the relatively calm waters off of Waikiki, there's a lot of chatter about how difficult it is to spot him, implying that if someone were to fall into the North Pacific during the actual race, it's Davy Jones' locker, for sure.

But once the race starts, it's obvious that there's a camera boat tailing the yacht, ready and able to snatch up any overboarders. The very artifice of the filmmaking mitigates against the (artificial) dramatic points the film is trying to convince us of. Sigh.

Those fans of sailing and racing—and I am one—will find the physical details of the TransPac fascinating, and the movie is made with a very high threshold of skill. Some of the camerawork is gorgeous. It's all laid on with a poppy soundtrack, and some of the kids even perform their own song they wrote during training. Of course, being a Disney uber-production, their simple, catchy song is multitracked with gigantic choruses and thunderous instrumental overdubbing.

Sometimes you go sailing to get away from all that.