Movie SUMMARY

This is an excellent movie that tells the story of the Essex; a whaling ship that is the basis for the novel, Moby Dick. Very few of the crew survived. They were reduced to eating their fellow crew mates in order to make it to civilization. Sometimes when they were rescued, they did not believe it and made no motion toward the ships that finally found them. It is a horrific and compelling story.

The movie is told to Herman Mellville by one of the only surviving crew, a boy at the time played by Tom Holland. When he finally tells the story he is an old man who has kept secret about what happened to the ship and what they had to do to survive. It is obviously gut wrenching for him to tell the story that has haunted him his whole life. Trust me, as gruesome as the movie is, the book is worse.

The movie even includes items in the book and from Moby Dick that you don't often think of when it comes to whaling; like how they had to fight off sharks after the whale was killed; how they had to boil the whale down; how they would climb into the whale to get the best oil in the whales sonar sensory organs. The CGI in this movie is well done. I give this a thumbs up.

In the winter of 1820, the New England whaling ship Essex was assaulted by something no one could believe: a whale of mammoth size and will, and an almost human sense of vengeance. The real-life maritime disaster would inspire Herman Melville's Moby-Dick. But that told only half the story. "In the Heart of the Sea" reveals the encounter's harrowing aftermath, as the ship's surviving crew is pushed to their limits and forced to do the unthinkable to stay alive. Braving storms, starvation, panic and despair, the men will call into question their deepest beliefs, from the value of their lives to the morality of their trade, as their captain searches for direction on the open sea and his first mate still seeks to bring the great whale down.