Morning Light **1/2

Directed by Paul Crowder and Mark Monroe. With Roy Disney, Chris Branning, Jesse Fielding, Steve Manson, Kate Theisen and others. Distributed by Walt Disney Pictures. 1 hour, 40 mins. PG (adult themes). Playing at: Ritz at the Bourse.

Young mariners do the epic transPacific sailboat race between Long Beach, Calif., and Diamond Head, Hawaii, in Morning Light, an OK sports doc that owes as much to reality TV competitions as it does to the genre of nautical cinema.

The brainchild of Roy Disney, Uncle Walt's nephew and a yachtsman who has done the "transpac" himself more than a dozen times, Morning Light follows 15 college-age sailors - all but two of them male, all but one white - as they go through the rigors of a six-month training program to prepare for the annual 2,200-mile race.

Only 11 will be on the crew of the 52-foot state-of-the-art sloop, and so Morning Light has that inevitable Project Runway/Survivor moment when a couple of folks we've come to know (a bit) are voted off.

Nicely shot, with sunrises casting light on bobbing dolphins, and the strapping bods of the crew jibing in stormy swells, the film offers some of the usual cliches: It's "about the journey," not the final result. Teamwork rules. Yada yada.

Morning Light could have been more effective if it had gone deeper into the backstories. Instead, we get hometown/college/age/aspirations, and some voice-overed journal entries and startlingly banal e-mail exchanges. Once the race is under way, the drama - and the boat - is at the mercy of the wind, the weather and the water. - Steven Rea