Review of In the Heart of the Sea (2015) by Mattbrady99 — 13 Dec 2015

Owen Chase: "Look where we find ourselves. What offense did we give God to upset him so".

In the Heart of the Sea takes place in 1820, a whaling ship out of New England, the Essex, encountered a sperm whale that seemed to have a streak of human vengeance, assailing the ship and stranding the crew out in the ocean for 90 days. The true story was the inspiration for Herman Melville's classic novel, Moby Dick.

So I've just seen In the Heart of the Sea and it very disappointing. It was one of my most anticipated movie of December right next to Star wars, The Revenant and The Hateful Eight, but sadly it didn't live up to my expectations as much as I wanted it to. The trailer for the movie completely lied to us just like most trailers today, I mean the whale itself shows ups a couple of times in the movie and we stuck with characters that we don't care about.

Ron Howard can be a mix bag sometimes when it comes to his movies. Some are good, some are in the middle and some bad. But I still think he's a great director that can really bring a well crafted and brilliantly directed movie. While I thought Rush (the 2013 film with Chris Hemsworth and Daniel Brühl) was a solid movie, but it's not the type of movie I'll be re watching any time soon, but still I think it's a well directed movie and it showed that Ron Howard still got it when it comes to film making. And here he's still got that unique film making quality in him and I think he did a good job of making the audiences feel really small, and it's not just because of the whale that makes you feel small but the sea itself. But I feel like he really lost himself mid way through the movie as he really lost it's touch. The directing was good, just not brilliant as I wanted it to be.

Chris Hemsworth was really good in this movie and this is the role that he really went for it. If you haven't heard about the shocking weight loss that he did just for the movie and now that's what I call dedication right there. The same thing can be said about the rest of the cast as there wasn't a weak performance. Hemsworth's accent dose go off and on quite often, but overall all the performances from everyone were good.

The movie is basically a man vs nature type of movie which is favorite part of the movie by far.

Now for the problems: I did not give a crap about any of these characters and that's a big problem. The characters are so bland, so dull and quite unlikable. Nothing is development with the characters and the only time that I actually cared for them is around the third act. The writers try to make us care for Hemsworth character just by adding in the most cliche thing that any screenwriter can writer to his character and that's having are main hero have a pregnant wife who's at home, so he fights for survival to get back to her, but do the writers know that makes the character more basic, unoriginal and cliche. That's not going to make me automatically like the guy.

The visual effect's was another thing that was so disappointing to me, because the effect's were very noticeable at times and it's mostly the CG background. The effect's on the whale looked great but the effects for everything else was pretty bad and quite disappointing, since effect's should be better right now, but then again, I said the same thing about Transformers 4 and Fant4stic.

Overall In the Heart of the Sea was very disappointing and it could have easily been great. The characters are dull, the effect's are noticeable, it's slow at times and the cinematography doesn't quite have that epic scope that the movie wants.