In the Heart of the Sea

I got incredibly lucky to get a pre-screening of In the Heart of the Sea a few days before the movie was actually released in theaters. I’ll be honest, while I saw the trailers for this movie and it looked exciting, its honestly not the kind of movie that I would go out of my way to go and see, much less pay money for it. However, when it comes to seeing a movie before everyone else, it does make me feel a little bit special and I wanted to get a review out on this movie before everyone had a chance to see it so you could tell whether or not this is a movie you’d like to see before you have the opportunity to see it.

In the Heart of the Sea is a movie that I think a lot of people get confused when it comes to the premise. A lot of people think that this is a film adaptation of Moby Dick. Others think that this movie is just about a Whale attacking a ship of whalers. While both those assumptions and probably a lot of other assumptions have elements of truth about them, this movie is about a lot more than Moby Dick or a giant whale. This is mainly a story of survival. But it also has a lot of themes and arcs that are really interesting that make it more than just a White Whale movie.

I’ll talk more about the themes of this movie but first I’ll talk about the plot.

In the Heart of the Sea is mainly a flashback as being told by an former sailor (played by Brendan Gleeson) to Herman Melville (played by Ben Whisaw) who wants to record his story to inspire his new novel, Moby Dick. The flashbacks mainly follow the story of Owen Chase (played by Chris Hemsworth) the first Mate on a Whaling ship in Nantucket Massachusetts in the 1800s. The main story is about him, the Captain of their ship, the Essex (played by Benjamin Walker), and the crew of the Essex and their whaling journey as they run into a whale that acts with a sense of vengeance against the whaling ship, starting this story of survival that force the crew to do anything they can to survive.

That’s the short summary, but there are a lot of themes and subplots that I really liked in this movie. The main one that I liked the most but felt like they didn’t develop fully is the relationship between Owen Chase and the Captain, George Pollard Jr. As a member of the military, I recognized a story about leadership and respect in this movie. Chase is a veteran whaler who has earned his status, whereas Pollard is new and only has this job because of his family name. From the very beginning, these two butt heads and there is a difficult relationship that I was waiting to be resolved… but it kind of formed into a totally different theme halfway through.

Halfway through, the movie’s theme changes suddenly to the roles of man on the Earth and the human ego and where will that pride lead you in the end.

Listen, I loved both themes and I think in a way they could have done both, but it just got very confusing when they were so focused on the leadership dynamic between Chase and Pollard in the beginning and then they shift gears and focus more on man’s pride and his relationship with nature and the whole theme on leadership just went away.

This was probably the biggest problem I had with the movie but I do think that that is a big issue, especially if you have such an interesting and quite inspiring plot as In The Heart of the Sea. Like I said before, I like either themes, either the leadership or the man vs nature story, but I think you have to choose one.

I personally liked the theme of leadership more than the man vs nature for the reason of I liked the scenes where it was the men surviving and how Chase and Pollard help their men survive more than the scenes with the whale. Don’t get me wrong, the whale was a great visual and everytime he showed up and did his whole crazy jumping out of the water thing, I got excited, but with how much of a pivot it was to bring in this man vs nature theme, I don’t think there was much of an argument and it became preachy pretty quickly.

Now, while I had an issue with the flow of this movie and its ideas, I did really like the performances in this movie.

The most notable scenes were oddly enough the scenes between Brendan Gleeson and Ben Whisaw. Both of these actors are incredibly underrated and incredibly talented, especially Brendan Gleeson. And they just kill it because while the flashbacks had a couple of themes that didn’t exactly work, the exchanges between Whisaw and Gleeson were more personal and more about courage and dealing with the things one has done in the past. So I loved these two in the movie and they were probably the best part.

That’s not to say the performances of everyone else in the movie wasn’t good, I just think that the writing perhaps wasn’t as good and that might have hurt their performance in the end.

I think a lot was riding on this movie, especially for Chris Hemsworth.

Hemsworth up until this point has only really been known for his performance as Thor. I haven’t seen Rush, but while I’ve heard good things about it, I don’t know how much capital Hemsworth has to just go and do whatever project he wants to do. I think that this movie was a testing ground for a lot of people to decide whether or not Hemsworth could be a leading man outside of his Thor movies.
And the result is mixed, at least for me.

The biggest issue I think I had with Hemsworth was his accent. I know it’s the 1820s and people aren’t going to have the American accent that they have now, but the result was confusing for me. Either Hemsworth was trying to do an American accent and it just wasn’t melding and some of his actual accent bled through, or he had some kind of muddled British/ Australian/ American accent that just overall was confusing. Now the accent could be a big deal for some and small deal for others. For me, it really didn’t bother me that much. I was more focused on his performance and I thought that it was very good. It was a little bit like Thor and I’m wondering if that works against him, but I thoughts Chris Hemsworth gave a good performance. Not the best, but I think he’s building towards something bigger and I think he could be a better actor down the road, but he still has some work to do.
A fun surprise of the movie was Benjamin Walker. I had never heard of Walker prior to this movie so it’s always good to see new actors and see how they fare in big budget movies like this. Again, unfortunately, I don’t think his character was written that well, but I thought that he worked with what he had and I’m actually interested in seeing more of Walker’s filmography.

But the real highlight (besides Gleeson and Whisaw) was Tom Holland as a young sailor on the ship who Chase takes under his wing. Again, its unfortunate that his character isn’t written as well as I would have liked him to be but I did really enjoy the performance by Holland nonetheless.

This is a totally unrelated rant to In the Heart of the Sea and I have tried to stop bringing in Comic book movies into every movie that I watch, but I do think this is worth mentioning because this is the first performance I’ve seen of Tom Holland and that is interesting as he is playing Spider-man in Captain America: Civil War and the future new Spider-man movies.

Now I have been a skeptic of Marvel going right back to Spider-man in high school again. I personally wanted them to go with an older Peter Parker, but I also was skeptical that a Tom Holland aged Spider-man would be able to run with the likes of Chris Evans and Robert Downey Jr. This movie shuts down all those doubts.

Holland is surrounded by really good actors like Hemsworth, Cillian Murphy, Walker (and a crap load of Game of Thrones actors oddly enough) and he holds his own in this story. Again, while I don’t think the flashback story is written as well as the exchanges between Gleeson and Whisaw, I do think that Holland, and the other actors really work well with what they have.

I don’t think this is a horribly written movie. I think it’s a lot better than a lot of movies I’ve seen recently and I think there’s hints of something really great within this movie, but I thought, especially with the themes of the movie, there were a lot of rough patches within this movie and the movie suffered in my mind.

I still think that if you’re interested in this movie, you should definitely go check it out. It is a good movie and I think if the biggest complaint is the themes in the movie, I think that’s a more high caliber critique. I think if the issues that I mentioned were fixed, In The Heart of the Sea could have been a really great movie. I don’t usually give letter grades, or rank movies on this blog, but I think the issues in this movie are keeping it from receiving an A or a 8 or 9 out of 10. As it is, I see this movie as deserving more of a B or a 6 or 7.

Now I realize that you probably can’t discuss this movie (at least not yet) But if you have any questions about the movie, or have your own thoughts on any aspect of this movie, you can share your thoughts below.

You can also send me your thoughts on Twitter @cmhaugen24 as well as sending me your requests for future reviews I should do on the blog. If you follow me on Twitter, you will get updates on future movie news and reviews as well as live-tweets of certain movies I end up watching so you can see how my ideas on movies form.

I’ll leave you with this. I really do like Chris Hemsworth and oddly enough he's incredibly hilarious when he usually does serious and comic book stuff. Here's a bit that he did on SNL. Enjoy!