by In my campaign review for In The Heart of The Sea I wrote:
And it certainly wants to sell you on the movie having an epic, yet still deeply personal, story. So it sets the drama of Chase’s personal journey along with that of the rest of the crew against the vastness of the sea, the size of the whale they’re chasing and the grand scale of man against beast.
There are two general directions my thoughts about the movie itself are going in:
First: The campaign largely ignores the framing device of the movie, which is that the story of the Essex is being conveyed to Herman Melville himself by one of the survivors. Melville, played by Ben Whishaw, has far more screen time than the campaign lets on. And it becomes clear that the largely unseen narrator from the trailers is that survivor who is telling his story. This is a big element of the movie and indeed contains one of the more compelling emotional arcs but the role this plays gets short shrift, I think, in the marketing.
Second: The movie never really achieves the scale the campaign tries to convince the audience of. Maybe it’s an issue of cinematography but it never really feels like a “big” movie. Unfortunately with the exception of the scenes between Whishaw and Gleeson it never really achieves the kind of intimacy that is needed to make it compelling in that way either. Hemsworth is at his best in just about every scene *but* those that involve hunting the whale, which means you don’t care about the character just at the moments you most need to. It really wants to be an epic, but it never quite pushes through the barrier to make it to that goal.
There were no overt falsehoods in the campaign – I can’t even identify any dropped scenes or anything – so the “trying too hard” impression I got from the marketing is, unfortunately, an accurate representation of the film itself.
