I went to see the 4:00 bargain matinee of "In the Heart of the Sea" yesterday. I was the only person in the theater; when I left there were several hundred people in the lobby (presumably either going to "The Hunger Games" or buying tickets for "Star Wars").
"In the Heart of the Sea" is getting lackluster reviews; I don't imagine it will be in the theaters long. I think I'm pretty hard to please when it comes to seafaring movies, but I have to say this is one of the best I've seen.
Spoiler alert: the whale wins.Yay!
The movie tells - reasonably accurately - the story of the whaleship Essex, which in 1820 was rammed and sunk by a large and extremely displeased sperm whale. I don't know the name of the vessel that played the Essex. It's a brig, whereas the real Essex was a three-masted, full-rigged ship. I can live with that, though; three-masted full-rigged ships aren't easy to come by, and plenty of early whalers were brigs and schooners. Once I got past that point I found the vessel quite convincing - and the whaleboats were beautiful. That in itself says a good deal about the producers' efforts to make the film realistic.
I hadn't heard of any of the actors, but I thought the general quality of acting was quite high. Almost all of the men on board are pretty young; that's accurate. (How anybody over about forty could physically do that job is beyond me.) The story is told in the form of flashbacks from the memory of a man who was a young sailor at the time of the disaster, as he relates the story to Herman Melville thirty years later. (At least one critic scoffed at the notion that the Essex incident inspired Moby He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named, but Melville's writings make it clear that the movie has it just about right.)
The photography is spectacular, and so are the whales (who, I assume, were computer-generated). They're a lot more convincing than the inflatable rubber ones Gregory Peck chased in the old movie version of...the Melville book. I wasn't quite as happy with the scenes supposedly shot on Nantucket; the background painters (or whatever such people are called) didn't quite understand what the rigging of a ship tied up to a pier looks like. But once the Essex gets out of sight of land, the "look" of the movie is quite impressive. Especially the wide-angle shots of the tiny whaleboats chasing the whales.
One aspect of the story that bothers some people is that the survivors, after sailing their whaleboats for a couple of months in the far reaches of the Pacific, resorted to eating the flesh of those who'd died. The movie doesn't actually show any human gore (plenty of whale gore, though); the steps in eating somebody are described it quite a bit of detail, but we don't actually see what happened.
I wouldn't take kids to this movie. (The scenes where the blubber gets cut off the whale's carcass are pretty gross, and the one where the young sailor climbs down the blowhole into the whale's skull pursuing spermacetti is downright disgusting). But for adults whose stomachs aren't too sensitive - and that includes ship buffs - it's a highly entertaining, reasonably accurate film - within the inevitable limitations of Hollywood.
Strongly recommended.