I relished the smack of its humongous tail, which sends a wall of water coursing into the lens, and Chase’s sighting of his prize. You can feel his very boyhood being washed away.Īnd so, around the Horn, into the kingdom of the white whale-a patched and piebald beast, which has clearly been told by its agent that it can look forward to a long and fabulous career as the world’s largest metaphor. The camera stays with him, and justly so. Nothing in the hunt is as memorable as the blessed pause that comes in its wake, as the wounded whale sprays blood through its blowhole, and Thomas’s awestruck face is dusted with a rain of red. Just to crank up the turmoil, “In the Heart of the Sea” can be seen in 3-D, so that masts and braces keep poking you in the nose. What matters is that the frenzy of the occasion should be matched by the drubbing of the images, which must pelt us without pity or interruption. No longer, it seems, are we required to know who is doing what, and where, at any given point. This is partly because computer-generated waves never quite buffet us with the slap of the real thing, and also because, in the twenty years since Howard made his finest film, “Apollo 13,” something has happened to the editing of action sequences. The pacing here is certainly forceful, as it is during the harrying and the slaughter of a sperm whale, and yet the force lacks clarity. Only once does Howard reap a fitting whirlwind, as Pollard, displaying poor seamanship and ignoring Chase’s advice, leads his vessel into the maw of a storm. Primed by “Moby-Dick,” we brace ourselves for a clash of sovereign wills, but, as with so much in the movie, the setup peters out. Up against Pollard is the more seasoned Owen Chase (Chris Hemsworth), the first mate, who hails from poor farming stock and is not allowed to forget it. The captain is a tyro named George Pollard (Benjamin Walker), who got the job because of his moneyed father.
The meat of the film, then, belongs to the voyage of the Essex. By recounting them, not only does he assuage the pain he is also paid by Melville, who, amply and sufficiently inspired, goes away to compose his book.
He was then a boy of fourteen (Tom Holland), and the trauma of those events has vexed him ever since. He is a survivor of the Essex, a whaling ship that set off from Nantucket in 1819 and never came back, having been wrecked by a white whale in the Pacific-more desert than sea, as Nickerson recalls. If you are Herman Melville (Ben Whishaw), say, you show up one night at the home of Thomas Nickerson (Brendan Gleeson).
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The movie is touchingly explicit about how to write an epic novel. Ron Howard’s new movie reimagines the ill-fated voyage of a whaling ship.
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