Headscratchers / Free Willy

• The last time I watched "Free Willy", I was about nine, so this never occured to me. However, when I watched it again as an adult, something bugged me a lot about the way the protagonists went about rescuing Willy after his tank was destroyed by the villains. Why didn't anyone think of calling the police, or a conservation group specialising with rescuing whales? Heck, why not both? Instead, they decide to be Big Damn Heroes and take Willy's rescue into their own hands with no prior experience and training in rescuing wildlife. Maybe I'm overthinking it, but surely someone like the Greenwoods would have suggested calling the police to catch the antagonists in the act or called in wildlife rescue. There may be a lot of awkward questions being asked by the police and wildlife groups, but at least TRAINED people would be at hand.
  • The explanation the film seems to go with is that keeping Willy alive is the highest priority. The park doesn't seem to have any other tanks capable of holding him, and the one he's in originally is draining fast enough to contain him for long. Depending on whether the police would believe Jesse about the owner sabotaging the tank, he'd probably be taken out of his care, and since his family and the closest water source is right outside the park, it seems as though just bringing him there would make the most sense. The protagonists weren't releasing him themselves as a means of sticking it to the owner - they did it because they had to get Willy into another source of water or he'd die, and they knew that the owner would go to great lengths to prevent this if he found out.
    • Also, Jesse noticed that Willy is calling to his family who are out at the nearby bay. Being abandoned by his mother and realizing that Willy is just plain miserable in captivity, Jesse decided immediately that Willy needed to be with his family again.
• Also, another thing that bugged me: if Willy had been on that stretcher for hours, shouldn't his internal organs have been long crushed under his own weight? I understand this is what happens to a lot of stranded whales who eventually die even despite attempts at helping them back into the water.
  • I assumed the stretcher was designed to minimize the weight on his body. It's a stretcher, not a bed.
  • Eh, they can survive being out of the water for a few hours. There are plenty of incidents where beached orcas got put back into the water despite being on land for a long time.
  • Rae actually suggests that they call the police but Randolph says "What good would that do?" It still would have been a better thing to do but at least it got mentioned.
• Why did Willy even need to jump over the rocks? He could've jumped over the nets a lot easier. If they wanted to keep that climax, maybe he could've been surrounded by boats, but no...
  • It makes slightly more sense when you learn that killer whales will rarely try to cross nets even when they easily can, but still, the kid could've directed Willy to jump the nets like he did the rocks...
  • Because the men in the boats would've still tried chasing after him. By going over the rocks, now there's a barrier between Willy and Dial's men, allowing him to swim away without being intercepted.
• The ending is heartwarming, to be sure, but watching as an adult, I can't help but wonder how Jesse, Randolph, Rae, Glen, and Annie avoided prosecution for theft. Legally, Willy was still Dial's property, and as the film states he's worth $1 million, the gang is looking at grand larceny. True, Dial may not have wanted to implicate himself for insurance fraud when it was revealed why they took Willy, but as the only one who actually saw Wade compromise the tank was a 12 year old boy with a history of brushes with the law, it would be hard to prove.
  • Even if Jesse had multiple run-ins with the law, him opting to steal a whale for no reason would be hard to swallow. And who knows, maybe there was evidence of sabotage that would support his story, if the owner tried to pursue the issue legally.
  • He probably figured it was a no-win situation. If he presses charges then he might be found guilty and even if he wasn't the bad press could ruin him. Willy having fatal accident right after costing his owner a ton of money by refusing to perform? With a witness pointing the finger right at him? Best to just take the loss and move on.
• While it could be forgivable that Jesse, a kid, would believe that releasing Willy into the wild would be the best way to save him, there is no logical justification for why on earth any of the adults, particularly Rae and Randolph would think this is the most favorable outcome. It's established early in the movie that Willy has been in captivity for most of his life, in a tank that is too small for him. He has been hand fed and expects it; when Jesse throws a fish into the water, Willy brings it back and demands it be placed in his mouth. This is not a whale who is prepared to live by himself in the open ocean. He has none of the skills an adult orca needs to survive in the wild, including how to swim and hold his breath for long periods of time, how to protect against predators, how to hunt, or how to interact with others of his species. While getting him out of the tank and into the ocean solved one problem, it creates a dozen others. And why no one who has worked with whales—like Rae—points this out is insane.
  • Sadly, this is Truth in Television of what happened to Keiko, the whale who portrayed Willy in the movies. Following the film's debut, a campaign was undertaken to release him into the wild. It took years of training and Keiko never fully re-integrated into the wild. He failed to become part of a pod and could be seen seeking out human contact until his death in 2003, from pneumonia.
  • It was semi-handwaved with a line from Rae saying he was too old to be taken in to captivity, which was a reason he was so disobedient.
  • Also, Willy's family was waiting for him in the nearby bay, and Willy was calling to them almost every night. So when Willy was freed, he was reunited with his family, who helped him re-learn how to hunt.
  • As far as bringing the fish back, even if Willy isn't used to hunting, there's no way he doesn't know how to eat food that's dropped in the tank, especially given that he was able to get it in his teeth to bring it back in the first place. It seems more like he's just playing a game with Jesse.
• How would the owner of the oil tanker be able to sell the whales when they were not his to sell?
  • The crux of it is, at this point, they weren't considered anybody's property. The scheme was to remove Willy and his siblings from the ocean, supposedly just temporarily until they could clean up the oil spill. Then once they had the whales in a tank or whatever (presumably owned by them), they would turn around and sell them. No one else would have legal standing to contest it.