In the Heart of the Sea - 2 smiles

Visually, “In the Heart of the Sea” is worth seeing. But if you’re looking for epic story, you’re going to be disappointed. Don’t get me wrong. The movie has its moments, especially a successful whale hunt early in the story. However, the trailers create expectations of either a monstrous whale intent on revenge or an obsessive sailor seeking the destruction of the whale. You know, pretty much the story of Moby Dick. And, although Herman Melville is a character, the movie focuses on a group of men doing what is necessary to survive endless days on the ocean (remember the soccer team whose plane crashed in the Andes?) Director Ron Howard uses Melville (Ben Whishaw) and his curiosity about the mysterious circumstances of how the whale ship Essex sank as a framing device to tell this based-on-truth story. Melville finds Tom Nickerson (Brendan Gleeson), the ship’s only remaining survivor, who’s drinking his life away. At his wife’s pleading, Tom starts to recount the events of 30 years ago, when he was 14 (played by Tom Holland) (You might question the casting here as Gleeson is much older than his 44-yearold character.)

This is the story of two men, Captain George Pollard (Benjamin Walker) and his first mate, Own Chase (Chris Hemsworth). Pollard, the son of the expedition’s owner, is wealthy, arrogant, entitled and inexperienced. Chase is the real seaman, a working-class man with a chip on his shoulders. He’s also arrogant, but he has the skills to back it up. The most striking scenes are those that deal with the process of catching a whale, from spearing to the gory disemboweling. But after that, the whales are scarce and they must sail into less-traveled waters. It’s thousands of miles off the coast of South America where they encounter the big one. Once the monstrous whale sinks the Essex, the second half of the movie is spent with the survivors drifting on an empty ocean. In these interminable minutes, we don’t get anything resembling an understanding of character or how they survived. Of course, we didn’t get much character development in the first half either. “In the Heart of the Sea” tries to be about so many things: ambition, capitalism, greed and survival. In the end, it seems most interested in how Melville got the outline for his classic.