Melville's vast impossible novel destroyed. And the mythic 1956 Huston/Bradbury/ Peck movie sunken forever beneath this sterile ruin.
Ahab was never meant to be turned into a humane family man with rational motives. Peck, himself something of a lightweight, was infinitely more intelligent in playing Ahab as a mythic, larger then life, maniac obsessive.
Ishmael and Starbuck, Elijah and all the rest, are reduced to silly boyish fops.
The novel, with it's endless and often very boring digressions, but with an unequalled stream of biblically and passionate eloquence is also buried beneath the waves.
Every few years, as the public's intelligence and memory are shredded by the digital horror dehumanizing the species, the same movie, in every weakening versions, is rereleased to a new generation who have no idea what they are viewing is a watered down, insipid, soulless, visionless, cannabilized, rout of its predecessor.
Hurt and Hawke , far from rescuing this mess, have turned this into a weepy psychotherapy session between a poor shrink and a stupid patient.
The justifiably famous and remarkable text is immense and would have to be pared down, as it ws most skillfully in the 1956 version of the justifiably classic movie. If ever there was a case where old school photography is vastly more powerful then CGI dimensionlessness, this TV movie epitomizes it.
If this is your first exposure to Melville or a film version, please do yourself a favor and forget it. Why take one of the most famous and passionate books ever written, or the original; movie that does justice to this ultimate sea-tale, and ruin it for yourself with this silly dreck?
2 Reviews
Moby Dick Part 1
Prismark1013 November 2018
This first episode was dull, flat and boring.
Captain Ahab is shown as a stable family man at the beginning of this two parter. However once the ship Pequod is at sea, William Hurt hams it up as Captain Ahab. Mad as a box of frogs. Ethan Hawke does not even bother to keep up. In fact I was wondering what he was doing in this television series.
The Pequod is such as small ship I actually wondered if it could hold an ordinary sized dead whale nevermind the Great Whale Moby Dick that Ahab has been hunting since he lost his leg.
The CGI was rubbish, the production bordered on amateurish. At least the CGI Moby Dick at the end was made to look like a beast.
Captain Ahab is shown as a stable family man at the beginning of this two parter. However once the ship Pequod is at sea, William Hurt hams it up as Captain Ahab. Mad as a box of frogs. Ethan Hawke does not even bother to keep up. In fact I was wondering what he was doing in this television series.
The Pequod is such as small ship I actually wondered if it could hold an ordinary sized dead whale nevermind the Great Whale Moby Dick that Ahab has been hunting since he lost his leg.
The CGI was rubbish, the production bordered on amateurish. At least the CGI Moby Dick at the end was made to look like a beast.
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