In the Heart of the Sea

Ron Howard – 2015 – USA

How in the world do you screw up such an amazing, epic true tale as that of the wreck of the whaleship Essex?  By being a complacent, glorified hack like Ron Howard; that’s how.  I don’t dispute that the man is a competent director of safe, bland Hollywood fare, but there has never been evidence that he has any special interest in the subject matter of his films, and that’s the case here too.  This story demanded and deserved to be told by someone who has some kind of feeling for the history, milieu or themes that the story presents, or at least for the ocean itself.  I have no love for Howard nor disposable flavor-of-the-month star Chris Hemsworth, but I was eager to give the film a fair shake anyway because I was so interested in the story.  The film looks and feels like it was made on assignment, not because anyone really cared about it.  The effects are weak and the screenplay is sloppy.  I never felt that the Essex crew were in mortal danger from the leviathans they are supposedly chasing, only that the actors were straining to look scared while in the safety of a studio in front of a green-screen.  Presumably told from the point-of-view of the ship’s former cabin boy, the narrative proceeds to depict first-mate Owen Chase’s story instead, via scenes where the cabin boy is not even present and would not have known about.  It was a pointless source of confusion trying to keep straight whose story this is and who’s telling it.  The ad campaign tirelessly reminds us that the Essex incident inspired Herman Melville to write Moby-Dick, but it presents very little of what would have so transfixed Melville except for the basic fact of a whale sinking a ship; and of course Moby-Dick is about so much more than that.  The true story is gripping enough; why the filmmakers felt compelled to embellish so much is mystifying.  The whale didn’t stalk the survivors on the open sea for months after the wreck, as is portrayed in the film.  To suggest that a wild animal would engage in such a personal vendetta against one human being is a complete affront or (at best) a retarded misreading of the theme of Melville’s novel; which is the maddening indifference of nature.