Ron Howard
Heart of the Sea

THE REVIEW

[Contains spoilers]

Ron Howard's new film is certainly not a masterpiece, but it boasts some structural elements of merit that I would have expected to list among the flaws of a film of this type. Starting from the end, an adventure film that ultimately sees man defeated is already something unusual. The fundamental merit is this: the epic at the heart of Melville's novel is not an epic. It is a failure, a shocking confrontation with the limits of man in the face of the almost demonic power of nature. The conceptual core is this: First Officer Chase and the ship's captain Pollard initially believe themselves to be invincible, but the words the former addresses to the latter on the deserted island are clear: after all they have been through, how can one still say that man is the master of the world?

Alongside this reading, there is a second, more empathetic one: first, the sailors cheer, soaked by the bloody vapors of the slain whale, but in the end, Chase could harpoon the white whale and decides not to because seeing the wound left by the previous harpoon, he grasps the animal's pain. In this sense, its destructive charge assumes a much more intimate and not so metaphorical significance. Miyazaki addressed a similar theme in Princess Mononoke: the demon is nothing more than a wounded animal.

The film thus steers well clear of triumphalist narrative schemes, which benefits the second half in particular. The first half, instead, focuses on the portrayal of the protagonist's superhuman traits and therefore appears a bit two-dimensional. Howard tends to flatten the dichotomies and make them excessively evident. Between Captain Pollard and Chase, there is an almost caricature-like contrast given how exaggerated and devoid of nuances it is, at least initially. There is a certain lack of maturity in the scriptwriting, also because one of the two men is blatantly at fault while the other seems clairvoyant in everything he does.

Fortunately, as the plot develops, these sharp contrasts are softened, and the characters have a notable, although never too deep, evolution. Even the relationship between the two diegetic levels works, and the story has effects on the present of the secondary narrator Thomas Nickerson. Sure, still schematic outcomes, but better than nothing. Even the coming-of-age journey of young Nickerson is acceptable, albeit really bare-boned.

Otherwise, the film does not shine, but it's not to be discarded either. Some passages are aesthetically pleasing and chromatically appealing, but others appear overly polished and lit by unnatural lights, like the moment when Chase tries to harpoon the whale: he looks like Zeus in the act of throwing a lightning bolt. And then again: the claustrophobia of certain moments, the sense of precariousness and terror are well rendered, but in some action sequences, the changes in framing are all too frantic and add to the already chaotic movement of the ship at sea. In short, not a brilliant film but overall enjoyable, especially since it tells a part of the story related to Moby Dick that is decidedly less known.

6/10