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I'm rather surprised to be saying this, but In the Heart of the Sea is a pretty excellent film which is about as good a survivalist adventure as The Revenant though for completely opposing reasons. Despite the source material this has all of the qualities which make for a great Joseph Conrad story with even the framing device giving way to an observational mechanic of narrative in the Pole's brief fashion. It's absolutely ridiculous this wasn't a major financial success either as Howard crafts a surprisingly tense drama which deals with all of the themes of the genre through masculine visualization rather than a verbal expulsion. There's no fat or anything to distract from it being just a good old fashioned yarn. That it's packaged with so many talented actors doing well just embodying sea hardiness should have been icing on the cake (though that the actor who gives the worst performance via a slippery accent is the only one marketed speaks volumes about WB not knowing their audience). One real surprise is how Hemsworth embodies more of Capt. Ahab's eccentricities like obsessive fervor rather than the pathetic actual captain. This proves the second drama in a row for Howard where he complicates the villain into a quietly sympathetic character while allowing his hero to be someone I don't think he admires. It's a strange touch of auteurship for such a technical journeyman. I really hope this film gains in popularity as it is one of the best Hollywood being true to its nature films I've seen in some time.

knives wrote:I'm rather surprised to be saying this, but In the Heart of the Sea is a pretty excellent film which is about as good a survivalist adventure as The Revenant though for completely opposing reasons. Despite the source material this has all of the qualities which make for a great Joseph Conrad story with even the framing device giving way to an observational mechanic of narrative in the Pole's brief fashion. It's absolutely ridiculous this wasn't a major financial success either as Howard crafts a surprisingly tense drama which deals with all of the themes of the genre through masculine visualization rather than a verbal expulsion. There's no fat or anything to distract from it being just a good old fashioned yarn. That it's packaged with so many talented actors doing well just embodying sea hardiness should have been icing on the cake (though that the actor who gives the worst performance via a slippery accent is the only one marketed speaks volumes about WB not knowing their audience). One real surprise is how Hemsworth embodies more of Capt. Ahab's eccentricities like obsessive fervor rather than the pathetic actual captain. This proves the second drama in a row for Howard where he complicates the villain into a quietly sympathetic character while allowing his hero to be someone I don't think he admires. It's a strange touch of auteurship for such a technical journeyman. I really hope this film gains in popularity as it is one of the best Hollywood being true to its nature films I've seen in some time.

Despite the source material this has all of the qualities which make for a great Joseph Conrad story

Little confused what you mean by this. Have you read the Nathaniel Philbrick book the film is based on? It's unanimously and rightly praised as one of the finest non-fiction books of the last 25 years. The movie is a pulpish, inane reduction of a deep, broad utterly compelling work of research and history; by saying "despite the source material" it sounds as if you somehow think the film improved on a cheap tale!

As for the actors, this was woefully, insultingly miscast, and suffers from Hollywood's typical removal or combining of characters.

Ron Howard is a hack, period. I would bet good money that he never read the source material, though if he did he certainly misunderstood or resented it. It would take a director the likes of Herzog or Malick or Weir - someone with an appreciation of historical context, someone unwilling to jettison the many digressions in the book - to make even a passably watchable film from the book.

I meant Moby Dick by source material. I'm entirely unfamiliar with the actual book. Melville has this great philosophical style which Howard's film doesn't have. The terse way of exploring human nature you get in The Nigger of the Narcissus has great fidelity to this movie. There wasn't an attempt in that sentence to say that Melville is lesser than this film, but that it has more in common with Conrad.

I really don't care if Howard is a hack (I did call him a journeyman) or if he has read the source material. All that matters is if the film is any good. Based on your last sentence it sounds like you'd rather have the film work in the manner of Melville which is fine, but irrelevant to the Conrad invoking style Howard decided upon.

Liked In the Heart of the Sea a lot. Another big score for Howard and Hemsworth after the excellent Rush. Having said that, I am vaguely amused by those who seemed perplexed as to why this would have essentially failed at the box office. It all seems pretty self-evident to me. There's a lot of stuff here that is likely to just be rejected on principle (and I'm not talking about Hemsworth). It's also what I like best about the film. There's the rather stark melodrama that is laid out from the beginning with the broadly sketched characters. There's the reliance on CGI that's so extensive that at times it recalls the all encompassing quality of that aesthetic in the Star Wars prequels. And there's the actual content of the narrative itself with its heavy concentration on futility, failure and impotence. That mix is very impressive though. The melodrama is ultimately more sublime than at first it seems to be. Roughly hewn in the fires of all that despair the emotions emerge then as earned. For much of his career Howard has been experimenting, successfully or not, with melodramatic technique and form, how to extend it, give it weight; he continues that here. The CG, far from being lazily employed, casts the perfect quality of amber storytelling of an old fable, an old form, cast against that despair again, trying to take it up, deal with it it, but also incorporating the mystery of the unknowable as represented by the whale, a confrontation with a kind of unyielding limit. This idea is brought forth in several nicely succinct scenes that address and evoke that without overwhelming us with it. An excellent film then but by no means a surprising "failure".

You're probably right. I spent the first hour of the film thinking this would have worked a lot better for a mid '90s audience than one nowadays. There's an attractive classical tone of defeat and struggle which makes it seem different from anything else out there right now which I guess only heightens the AGI comparisons (which I suppose is humourous as The Revenant sounds like the harder film to market).

Spoiler

When they got to the cannibalism the difficulty it presents as a sale to general audiences became really clear. How Howard shifted back to the framing device emphasizing the moral weight of survival and taking away from the visceral reaction, in a way a descaling from what you talk about with regards to the CGI, is not a move I'd expect from any film nowadays. By talking about it the cannibalism almost becomes more real than showing it would have.