In the Heart of the Sea
Well, an actual Ron Howard film that is not utter crap? Imagine that. Wiped clean of deviant sexuality and dick jokes, just Apollo 13 in the Pacific Ocean.
There’s a framing device with the actual Herman Melville, having the story told to one of the kids on the boat, several years later. The main plot follows an ambitious farmer guy who rose to first mate and goes on a trip babysitting some blue blood captain. The farmer boy had assurances he would be captain this time, but it’s BS, freaking Quaker aristos.
Alas, he goes anyway, and the moron nearly kills the entire crew by driving them into a storm. They find a big whale, but not enough to fill their holds, so they go further, all the way into the Pacific Ocean.
On some Chilean port, they meet a captain without ship, saying he was attacked by a massive white whale in the middle of the ocean, further away from everything. Since it has whales, they go there, but when the ship is wrecked by said white whale, they have to limp home with the small whaler boats.
They take nearly three months to get to land, on two different boats, and many crew members perish. They only survive so long by finding uninhabited islands with water, and by eating their mates, drawing lots to see who blows his own brains out and gets devoured by the others.
When the survivors get back home, the rich force them to admit they fucked up for insurance purposes. But our hero has moral fortitude to tell them to shove it, and inspired the blue blood captain to also tell the truth. No consequences are explored for either of them, it seems no big deal to make their old bosses lose millions.
There is a very big cast of stars, but there not many characters for them to play, the characterisation is quite thin. The focus is on whaler scenes.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.