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Created Dec 26, 2015 07:22PM PST • Edited May 06, 2018 12:39AM PST

1. Quality

2. Summary

   Great 4.0

   Ron Howard takes on Moby Dick, starring Chris Hemsworth, in the poorly titled but highly accomplished In the Heart of the Sea. It plays like a 19th century Jaws, albeit with a giant Sperm Whale seeking vengeance on puny humans instead of a Great White Shark. It also challenges 21st century sensibilities.

   The shock stems from coming F2F with whaling. Save the whales? Uh no, the movie lionizes guys who kill them, the biggest, baddest hunters mankind ever produced, up close and personal. Howard plays this straight and irony-free, as is his wont. The result is an enthralling movie, at once a great adventure yarn and a useful tutorial about our early industrial past. The former is a bit contrived, the latter utterly fascinating.

   The businessmen who ran the whaling industry were the oilmen of their day. But the oil they harvested, traded and sold wasn’t fossil fuel. It came from what were considered sea monsters, not mammalian cousins of ours. These massive mammals – cows and calves and bulls – happened to carry liquid gold in their heads, at a time when modern living depended on whale oil. Who could blame an old bull for fighting back.

   The fact that this really happened, mostly anyway, gives In the Heart of the Sea considerable resonance. Overly contrived scenes on-ship and with Moby Dick author Herman Melville almost drag it down, but the fascinating economic history and the life-and-death struggles at sea lift it into the realm of greatness.

4. Acting

   Very Good 3.5

   Chris Hemsworth has become a reliable leading-man in action-oriented movies, studly yet likable, handsome but not pretty, and a more than serviceable actor, capable of emoting with women and men alike. In short, he doesn’t make a movie worth seeing by being in it, but improves most any movie he is in.

   Solid Supporting Cast

   • Benjamin Walker is alternately callow and handsome as the scion of a prominent whaling family.
   • Cillian Murphy’s pretty-boy looks have deepened, allowing his acting to come to the fore, which is quite good as it turns out.
   • Brendan Gleeson plays the adult cabin boy whose recollections set the story in motion and does so effectively, a lifetime of regret in his face. Tom Holland plays him as a boy, in the more action-oriented phase of the role.
   • Michelle Fairley is properly affecting as his wife.
   • Ben Whishaw fails to impress as legendary novelist Herman Melville.
   • Charlotte Riley jumps off screen as Hemsworth’s wife. Interestingly, she’s the real-life wife of super actor Tom Hardy.
   • Gary Beadle as whaler William Bond, one of many African-American whalers during this pre-Civil War time period.
   • Frank Dillane as Owen Coffin, a famous name from the legendary Essex disaster story.

5. Male Stars Great 4.0

6. Female Stars Very Good 3.5

7. Female Costars Very Good 3.5

8. Male Costars Very Good 3.5

10. Film

    Great 4.0

    Classic Ron Howard film: irony never emphasized; a perfect tear rolls down a cheek at the perfect time; tremendous verisimilitude of place, period and perceptions; good men doing manly work.

11. Direction Really Great 4.5

12. Play Very Good 3.5

13. Music Great 4.0

14. Visuals Perfect 5.0
15. Content

16. Edge

    Tame 1.4

    All the brutal parts are downplayed to maintain the PG-13 rating. So whales are not shown suffering (mostly) and the cannibalism that the crew resorted to to survive occurs off-screen (thankfully).

17. Sex Innocent 1.0

18. Violence Fierce 2.0

19. Rudeness Polite 1.3

21. Reality

    Glib 1.3

    First, let’s address the movie’s cinematic slight of hand, which is considerable. For starters, Herman Melville learned of the ship-wrecking Great White Whale from Owen Chase’s book Narrative of the Most Extraordinary and Distressing Shipwreck of the Whale-Ship Essex, not from interviewing the ship’s aged cabin boy. We might also presume that the dramatic storm scene never happened. Ah, Hollywood.

    Cinematic reality aside, In the Heart of the Sea illuminates whaling, one of the epochal phases of human development. The terminology alone – whalers and harpoons and all that – lives with us today.

    It also highlights the progression of human energy sources: slaves, animals, wood & peat, charcoal, whale oil, coal, hydromechanical, petroleum & natural gas, hydroelectric, nuclear, solar-cells, wind. How does the progression of the last two differ from those that came before? Because they are markedly less energy-dense than their predecessors, while the previous progression is one of increasing energy density.

22. Circumstantial Glib 2.0

23. Biological Natural 1.0

24. Physical Natural 1.0