Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs (2009)

Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs represents a modern 3-D homage to Herman Melville's Moby Dick, or a maybe it's just outright plot theft. A one-eyed weasel named Buck obsessively guides the old Ice Age gang through the jungle to find Rudy, an enormous white theropod dinosaur. A flashback scene shows the prior conflict between Buck and Rudy, where the dinosaur's talon strikes Buck's right eye. Fortunately for kids, the violence is only suggested here, rather than graphically depicted. Buck manages to patch his eye with a leaf, and narrowly escapes with his life.

Like Captain Ahab's whale-bone peg-leg, Buck's signature eye patch symbolizes his unending quest to vanquish his foe. Check out Ahab's rage here in Moby Dick:

The white whale tasks me; he heaps me. Yet he is but a mask. 'Tis the thing behind the mask I chiefly hate; the malignant thing that has plagued mankind since time began; the thing that maws and mutilates our race, not killing us outright but letting us live on, with half a heart and half a lung.

While we're quoting material obliquely related to Ice Age 3, how about a quote from the United States Eye Injury Registry?

Data from the National Center for Health Statistics' Health Interview Survey, conducted in 1977, estimated that nearly 2.4 million eye injuries occur in the United States annually. This report calculated that nearly one million Americans have permanent significant visual impairment due to injury, with more than 75% of these individuals being monocularly blind. Eye injury is a leading cause of monocular blindness in the United States, and is second only to cataract as the most common cause of visual impairment. USEIR estimates that 500,000 years of lost eyesight occur annually in the United States. Injury is the leading cause for eye-related hospital admissions.

A wonderful reminder about the importance of eye safety and the use of eye protection.

Ice Age 3 is a hyperkinetic family flick with a reasonable semblance of a plot pilfered from a great American author. There are a handful too many characters and their development subsequently suffers, but ultimately this forgettable movie achieves its modest goals. I'll give it a B - . Herman Melville's Moby Dick? An A - . Go dust off your high school copy, pull that bookmark out from Chapter 6, and give it another honest go.