In the Heart of the Sea review

Ron Howard’s “In the Heart of the Sea” is a 3D, special effects reimagining of Herman Melville’s “Moby Dick” that’s oddly bashful about its source material. The conceit is that this film is based on the true story that “Moby Dick” was inspired by, but given the level of artifice involved in the movie’s production, truth and authenticity hardly feels like the Howard's cinematic goal with this project. It’s also a special effects film in which the last 30 minutes primarily focuses on a group of starving men floating around in still waters.

Perhaps we need a new word for year-end, awards-baiting 3D films like “Gravity” and “Life of Pi”; not quite blockbuster, but not quite prestige film either. They exist somewhere in the middle, attempting to draw people in with the promise of spectacle, boasting a well-regarded cast and director and expressing just enough dramatic oomph to suggest a deeper regard for story than the summer’s brand of overblown toy commercials and comic book properties--or at least that’s the intended impression.

The story here is wrapped around a distracting framing device in which Brendan Gleeson recounts his time at sea as the youngest passenger aboard the movie’s nautical whaling adventure. As he tells this story to a young Herman Melville with writers-block (Ben Wishaw), we go back to the early 19^th century when whale-oil was a huge political and economic commodity.  Gleeson’s character is now played by future-Spider-Man Tom Holland, who looks up to the handsome and masculine Owen Chase, played by Chris Hemsworth. Chase is upset because, though he is more qualified and experienced, he is made second in command of his whaling ship to George Pollard (Benjamin Walker), who was hastily made captain through nepotism. After spending months at sea with little to show for it, the crew is told that there is a stretch of ocean a few thousand miles off the shores of Argentina lousy with whales, so long as they can survive a monstrous, vengeful sea-demon known as…well, not Moby Dick, because this isn’t that story…exactly.

Out of the gate this film is hobbled by the story within a story about a story concept, and with the narrator’s timeline intermittently weaving in and out of the film’s primary narrative, a lot of dramatic tension is broken to serve the movie’s and the tension that exists between it’s want to relish in lush production and its perceived ‘truthiness.’ Besides the whale attack money shots and the occasionally impressive vista, Anthony Dod Mantle’s cinematography is beholden to the 3D moments and blandly color-corrected with an aqua-marine tinge that actually flattens the dynamics of every shot.

That said, I can’t deny that the film eventually wormed its way into my psyche as the third act delved deeper into its characters and raised the stakes of their personal sense of humanity. Though the movie slows down to a crawl and essentially abandon’s its high-concept effects-ride premise, I could appreciate some of the narrative risks it was willing to take. Of course these risks are somewhat undercut by the need to have Wishaw and Gleeson explicate the movie’s themes every time the movie felt the need to cut back to the framing device.

“In the Heart of the Sea” is a gaudy, noble failure that mostly doesn’t work, but it’s also not entirely unentertaining. A lot of the movie is undeniably hokey. The performances are a little over-mannered, even by seasoned pros like Hemsworth and the great Irish actor Cillian Murphy, and with their old-American costumes and warbled accents much of it plays like an expensive episode of Comedy Central’s “Drunk History.” Which isn’t to say that there isn’t some inherent fun to be had in that aesthetic. Thematically, the movie struggles to tie together its semi-environmental ideas about the oil industrial complex with its sub-“Jaws” competition of masculinity themes and by the end of the film audiences are likely to feel bait-and-switched by how slow and dark the movie allows itself to get.

Grade: C-

Originally Printed in the Idaho State Journal/Dec-2015

Listen to more discussion about "In the Heart of the Sea" on this week's "Jabber and the Drone" Podcast.