Ron Howard’s epic retelling of the story that inspired Herman Melville’s classic Moby Dick has one or two moments of inspiration but never quite convinces – despite considerable and agile CGI and a first-rate cast.
The problem is one that is shared by the adrift at sea stretch of Unbroken – sun, sea, no land; sun, sea, no land – it gets tedious. Even when the film alludes to certain abominations the survivors performed to stay alive.
In The Heart of the Sea opens promisingly enough with the young Melville (Ben Whishaw) tenaciously convincing Tom Nickerson (Brendan Gleason), the last remaining survivor of the whaling ship the Essex, to tell him the real story of what happened. Rumor, it appears, conflicts with the official story of the ship running aground and the majority of its crew drowning.
Melville wants to write the real story, but it takes Mrs. Nickerson (Michelle Fairley) to tip the balance in his favor and get old Tom talking – aided by liberal amounts of booze.
The story opens with conflict – perennial First Mate Owen Chase (Chris Hemsworth) finds himself babysitting a new captain who was born into a wealthy whaling family, George Pollard (Benjamin Walker, Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Fighter) despite having been promised the captaincy himself.
We see Chase leave his pregnant wife and set out with optimism before learning his dream has been thwarted by greed and family pride – and shortly, we see that Pollard is not a competent captain. His orders lead to the ship being damaged in a storm, putting their schedule even further behind than their late start.
In short order we meet the main crew members – Second Mate Matthew Joy (Cillian Murphy, Peaky Blinders), Caleb Chappel (Paul Anderson), Ben Lawrence (Joseph Mawle), the captain’s cousin Henry Coffin (Frank Dillane), and young Tom (Tom Holland).
We get a look at whale hunting and it’s a nasty business – a sequence where young Tom has to crawl inside a sperm whale’s head is daunting stuff. After months of not a lot of luck, the Essex hears of a vast area filled with whales – a thousand leagues along the equator, but put warnings of a giant white whale down as drunken babblings – though said whale apparently stove in a Spanish ship and killed many of its crew.
So, now we know pretty much what’s going to happen to the Essex and only cuts to the increasingly drunker Melville and old Tom make the obvious palatable – as when the subject of cannibalism comes up and we cut back to them without ever actually seeing it.
Tedious scenes adrift aside, there’s precious little characterization here. Chase gets more backstory than anyone other than Tom – and we intuit more about Tom from seeing how he wound up than from what we see when he was at sea.
Technically, the 3D is spotty but the CGI are pretty spectacular – mostly because the CG effects read a photo real and only show a bit of patchiness in a few shots of the white whale.
There’s no way around it, though, In the Heart of the Sea barely floats, buoyed only by a cast that rises above the material and the effects. Without top notch work on both fronts, the film would sink faster than the Essex.
Final Grade: B-