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Whale tale: In the Heart of a most middlebrow Sea (B-)

First things first: I haven't read Moby-Dick. If that doesn't sound like an egregious enough crime, consider that I was also an English major. The shame. I'll be over here swabbing the decks.

We address the great white whale apropos of In the Heart of the Sea, the new seafaring adventure based on Nathan Philbrick's popular nonfiction book. Herman Melville is actually a character in the movie, played by an earnest Ben Whishaw in a framing story that darts in and out of the main action. The scribe wants to write a book about the Essex, a whaling ship that met a nasty end in the Pacific Ocean back in 1820. Melville has located the last survivor of the expedition (the great Brendan Gleeson). And so we set sail on the Sea of Flashback.

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Directed by good Hollywood soldier Ron Howard, In the Heart of the Sea is everything you might expect and a little bit less. It's solid if rarely spectacular, engaging if rarely engrossing. The herky-jerky pace suggests someone told Howard to trim the sails by about a half-hour; the efficiently told story has trouble building sustained moments of visual poetry or visceral terror.

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Heaven knows there's plenty to fear, from the vengeful mammal that inspires the bulk of the movie's awe, to the human debasement of excessive pride and, even worse, cannibalism. The film is at its best delineating the conflict between Owen Chase (Chris Hemsworth), the cocky Essex first mate of humble origins, and George Pollard (Benjamin Walker), the Nantucket blue blood captain whose rigidity doesn't exactly inspire respect among the crew.

But the adversaries have a few things in common. They're both greedy for whale oil, the coin of the realm in 19th-century New England. They're both sure they're always right. And their chest-puffing obstinacy is but a bubble in the ocean compared to the rage of nature, represented by a massive and massively determined sperm whale.

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The whale is the movie's MVP from the moment he arrives, after the Essex makes an ill-advised jaunt to a remote part of the Pacific. At first the men can't believe their good fortune: The trip has been a bit of a bust, and here's a veritable sea of whales, ready for the harpoon. (Greenpeace will not dig In the Heart of the Sea.) Then the big guy shows up, filling the screen like the imperial Star Destroyer at the beginning of Star Wars.

The seaborne cinematography is adequate enough, especially once the Essex crew is split off into smaller boats and the men get a sense of the vastness, loneliness and hunger before them. The wreckage of the Essex provides some of the film's most lyrical passages, as we get an underwater view of the detritus, complete with whale oil catching fire beneath the surface.

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In the Heart of the Sea is a dark tale told in a highly PG-13 manner. It doesn't approach the deep-rooted dread of another upcoming survival tale, The Revenant, nor does it probe very deeply into the true story's heart of darkness. In someone else's hands, In the Heart of the Sea might have left viewers shaken and gasping for land. What Howard and screenwriter Charles Leavitt have provided is a serviceable Hollywood product with a redemptive Herman Melville cameo.

Not that I begrudge Melville, whose immortal whaling epic was actually a flop until after his death (a fact the film neglects to mention). I'm just not sure he belongs as a character in this particular movie. Of course you can take that with a grain of sea salt, coming from someone who hasn't yet met Ishmael.

In the Heart of the Sea (B-) 

Directed by Ron Howard. PG-13 (intense sequences of action and peril, brief startling violence and thematic material). 121 mins. In wide release.