Moby Dick

2011

Seasons & Episodes

  • 1
6.2| 0h30m| TV-PG| en| More Info
Released: 08 May 2011 Ended
Producted By: Tele München
Country: Germany
Budget: 0
Revenue: 0
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Synopsis

The sole survivor of a lost whaling ship relates the tale of his captain's self-destructive obsession to hunt the white whale, Moby Dick.

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Reviews

Spidersecu Don't Believe the Hype
Ceticultsot Beautiful, moving film.
AshUnow This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.
Brainsbell The story-telling is good with flashbacks.The film is both funny and heartbreaking. You smile in a scene and get a soulcrushing revelation in the next.
nephihaha The best thing about this adaptation is the cast, featuring decent actors in even fairly minor roles, e.g. Gillian Anderson who plays the captain's wife, and Donald Sutherland who plays the preacher. Eddie Marsan, an extremely underrated actor, is probably the star turn here, playing a very thuggish Stubb. Starbuck (Ethan Hawke) and Queequeg (Trujillo) are also well portrayed.However, the film falls down on the two main (human) characters Ishmael (Cox) and Ahab (Hurt). Cox isn't bad, but he's also not that good either. William Hurt, though is miscast. He mumbles through a lot of the performance, and does not look fanatical enough. Sometimes when he's delivering angry speeches, he comes over as a kind uncle. Shame really, since Hurt has turned in decent performances elsewhere.Both Nantucket and the Pequod are recreated well. The CGI is respectable, showing that a decent amount of money was spent on the production. However, cynics will notice that with the exception of a single storm scene, the ship seems to sail on ridiculously calm seas.Moby Dick doesn't transfer to the screen well, as many of the book's fans constantly remind us. This adaptation is one of the better ones. This version is probably not as good as the Peck film, but I think it's better than the Patrick Stewart miniseries. (Stewart - again a good actor, was miscast as Ahab). As for the liberties taken with the storyline - I think these have been exaggerated - the inclusion of Ahab's wife is a major change, but not as intrusive as you might think.
Chakriya This lost me with Queequeg. Please, a Mexican with bad Maori imitation tattoos and an incomprehensible accent playing a Tongan/Fijian? About as special as Mickey Rooney in Breakfast at Tiffany's. And that pretty much sums up this remake.Yes, the names of the characters are the same. There are even some recognisable plot elements, like that stuff about the whale. And I don't even blame the screenwriters for omitting the 100-odd chapters of description about various forms of blubber. But please, hire a Tongan next time, I'm sure there are a few in California. Hey, get a Samoan if you are really stuck. But at least get the hemisphere right, if nothing else.
kickaxerrr "Moby Dick" is my favorite novel. I have read it many times. William Hurt and Ethan Hawke are two of my favorite actors. So I had high hopes for this movie version. My hopes were diminished slightly in the opening scene where Ishmael, the main character, saves Pip, the future cabin boy, from a beating on the way to Nantucket and brings him along. That scene never happened in the book. Pip doesn't show up until they are all on the ship, but I know that some liberties need to be taken in a translation from novel to movie, so I dismissed it. Then my hopes were completely dashed over the next 3 hours. In those 3 hours there were about 15 minutes worth of film that were actually taken from the book. It is as though the screenwriter read the back cover of the novel, where it says that it is the story of an obsessed captain chasing a white whale and wrote a completely new story based on nothing but that. One of the more obvious things is that, in the book, Ahab, the captain, doesn't even appear until days into the sea voyage when he finally emerges from his cabin. In the movie the first half hour or more involves him at home with his wife and son, neither of which are even in the book at all. Even the climactic ending has been changed a great deal. It would take up too much space to write about all the other things that are completely different from the novel. Basically this is not a film version of "Moby Dick" at all, it is an invention of the screenwriter, based on a similar idea.Forgetting all that, the movie itself, as a movie, is just not that good. The direction is OK and the performances are all relatively good, except for Hurt, who is, as another reviewer said "hammy" and "cheesy". He should have played a sandwich instead of Ahab. The special effects are sub par, considering what can be done nowadays. The whales shown often don't even make a splash when they dive under. They just disappear. The plot is thin with none of the characters really developed in any way, except perhaps for Starbuck the first mate, who is the only one in the movie who seems to even realize what is going on. Two earlier versions, the 1956 version with Gregory Peck and the 1998 version with Patrick Stewart, despite their own flaws were much better movies and more faithful adaptations of the novel than this one. So watch those, or even better read the book.
emmalsearle I'm going to go out on a limb and say Moby Dick doesn't lend itself to film and TV adaptations. The tale is dramatic, it's action-packed, it's visual and it's exciting, but there's an awful lot in the original text that you have to leave out in order to film it coherently. Melville's book is encyclopedic. It tells you a lot about whales and whaling; the motivations of the whalers, the camaraderie on board, the mechanics of capturingand dissecting the largest animal in the ocean and extracting theuseful stuff that keeps America burning. This adaptation (and probably ANY adaptation) cuts to the chase, omitting these complex descriptions of whaling life in favour of characters and action, the meat and potatoes of Hollywood filmmaking. In doing so, it loses something of the quality of the story. It also loses the narrator: on TV, Ishmael, a witty and endearing narrator, becomes a one-dimensional protagonist, totally overshadowed by Ahab.This is Ahab's film. William Hurt dominates every scene he appears in, and he appears in most of them. I'm convinced he's pulling out all the stops, aiming for an Emmy. I'm not sure how else to explain the hammy overacting, the grizzly beard, the cheesy dialogue delivered in a carefully cultivated "old salt" accent (ie. "aargh!" "aye!"). Hurt thinks he's playing Hamlet, and he wants Ahab's descent into madness to be central to the story. Ahab is typically dark, cursed, scarred, traumatised, intimidating and vengeful. Hurt's Ahab is just plain crazy. He jokes around with his men, delivers many of his most serious lines while grinning through his beard and squinting his eyes. On board the Pequod, he's like everybody's affectionate but slightly volatile Grandpa, not averse to a hug or a bit of laugh over a stein of grog. He says too much, and much of it is hard to understand, delivered in a sing-song cadence with emphasis in unusual places. Oscillating between booming vocal projection of Shakespearean proportions and just plain talking to himself, and introspective mumbling in which he appears to be talking to himself, Hurt seems to be performing for his own benefit rather than for an audience. This is an attempt to indicate Ahab's madness in a way nobody else has done before, but it alienates the audience as well as his fellow actors, and it's just not good acting. He's a piratey caricature whose attempts at pathos are unpersuasive. I prefer Gregory Peck's intense, brooding Ahab. A good Ahab should indicate more than he actually says, a dark exterior concealing untold depths of turmoil and mystery - like the sea! Argh!Ethan Hawke is a solid Starbuck, and a very human foil to Hurt's gruff, squinty captain. He's emotional, penetrative, and seriously worried about the fate of the ship. More than anyone else he embodies the atmosphere of impending doom that plagues the voyage, and his sense of mortality is a visibly heavy burden. When Starbuck says that what he wants most from the journey is "to see Nantucket again", you believe him. He's a homesick sailor. At that point, everything's beginning to go awry and we'd all like to see the Pequod turn around and go home. Starbuck's finest hour comes at the very end - I won't give anything away, but it's profoundly moving. Hawke's performance salvaged something of an otherwise perfunctory adaptation.Moby himself is, of course, CGI. In short, like so many massive movie monsters, he doesn't look real. It's not bad CGI, but it's difficult to convey the sublime weightiness of such a vast, living creature with special effects. Moreover, Moby is no ordinary animal - he's an icon, with a personality and a sense of mischief. At it's heart, the story of a whale cheating a whaler is almost comic, with the feel of a fable. I wonder if an animation might capture the spirit of the character (Moby is a character!) more than live action film with CGI. For the most part, they do a pretty decent job of Moby, except for a totally unnecessary scene at the very end which is embarrassingly rudimentary and looks like a scene from a video game.In summary, as a production it could be worse, but it didn't add anything to my experience of the story. I couldn't help feeling some of the actors involved (Donald Sutherland, Gillian Anderson, William Hurt) were simply trying to add another period piece to their CV's. They fulfilled the brief, but their performances were not memorable. Honourable mentions go to Eddie Marsan, who was an excellent Stubbs, and Billy Boyd who makes an impressive cameo as deranged prophet Elijah. There were some saving graces, but I'm yet to see an adaptation of Moby Dick that captures the spirit of the book. As nautical tales go, Peter Weir's Master and Commander gives a more vivid impression of life at sea. This canonical story with the feel of a great myth is told and retold, so perhaps there is yet hope for a cinematic adaptation that does the book justice. No doubt someone will take another stab at Moby Dick in the not-too-distant future; pun absolutely intended.

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