Based on Nathaniel Philbrick's book In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex, the film aims to tell the true story that inspired Melville's novel. Here Melville is played by Ben Whishaw, who bribes grumpy old drunk Tom Nickerson (Brendan Gleeson), an Essex survivor, to tell his tale. So Nickerson grumbles, takes a shot, and we flash back to when he was a wide-eyed kid (Tom Holland) serving the Essex's scowly first mate, Owen Chase (Chris Hemsworth), and naive captain, George Pollard (Benjamin Walker). Pollard, an idiot, promptly steers the Essex directly into a squall, and things get shittier from there—particularly for Nickerson, who, along with Howard's camera, gets shoved inside a dead whale's reeking carcass to ladle out ambergris. That claustrophobic, stomach-churning sequence is the best part of In the Heart of the Sea—it has guts, literally and figuratively. The rest of the movie tries to do a bunch of things, none too well: On the surface, it exploits the familiarity of Moby-Dick, but instead of Ahab, Ishmael, and Queequeg, all it offers are stiff clichés. The one through line is that the whole film feels both drawn out and rushed, lurching from scene to scene. In the Heart of the Sea clocks in at only two hours, but those two hours feel long enough to reread Moby-Dick.

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