What Culture
What do you do when you want to make an adaptation Moby Dick, but don’t want to deal with all the pressures and pitfalls of actually adapting Moby Dick? You dramatise the story it’s based on, of course.
Ron Howard’s film about the real life event that inspired Herman Melville to write his epic piece of American literature is quite obsessed with that novel, framed by the author learning the story from its last living survivor and pivoting on the true life moments that obliquely parallel or diverge with the text. It makes for a nice companion piece for sure, but I just couldn’t stop asking myself why Howard just didn’t bite the harpoon and do Moby Dick fully (all you lose, really, is one dark but literally undernourished subplot).
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Guess it's a film that starts with a splash and just floats along for the rest of it.