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In the Heart of the Sea is based on the sinking of the American whaling ship Essex in 1820. In the winter of 1820, the New England whaling ship Essex was assaulted by something no one could believe: a whale of mammoth size and strength attacks with force, crippling their ship and leaving them adrift in the ocean. During their voyage, the ship is sunk when it is rammed and split in half by a very large and enraged bull sperm whale, ultimately leaving its crew shipwrecked at sea for 90 days and more than a thousand miles from land.
If you want a Ron Howard movie about a man obsessed with a creature from the deep, "In the Heart of the Sea," sadly, is not the place to start. Try "Splash."
In the Heart of the Sea is an all-around disappointment. The film suffers from poor direction, an unfocused narrative, and some very underdeveloped characters.
There's a hollow at the heart of things, a strange decency and politeness for a film that strives to depict, in epic form, man's dark and visceral struggle with the world and himself.
It's sturdy, watchable, competently mounted, of course -- Howard is nothing if not a pro -- but except for the visuals, which can be quite stunning, it never roused me.
In the Heart of the Sea loses the human intimacy that makes this epic what it is, the resulting movie is nothing more than an empty voyage to nowhere that sinks far more often than it swims.
The vintage grotesquerie of the regular old whaling process turns out to be more disturbing than the dark adventures that are In the Heart of the Sea's reason for being.