When I first heard people criticizing this movie, I wrote them off as the typical whiners that accompany the release of any outrageously far-fetched monster movie. Of course whales can't grow to the size 2 football stadiums, and of course they can't snatch helicopters out of the air--that's why it's fiction! It's precisely this outrageous scale and the novelty of seeing the impossible that makes these films so entertaining and thrilling. However, this time the criticism proved to be 100% deserved.
Sci-fi B movies have their place in my heart. And I actually quite enjoyed Peter Benchley's "The Beast" and its epic portrayal of a giant man-eating squid. That was a made-for-TV movie from 1996; fourteen years later, we have "2010: Moby Dick". But although CGI has made huge leaps in the intervening years and no doubt costs far less these days, Moby Dick's special effects are still laughably bad in comparison. They simply come off as cheap and very rushed.
To be fair, the whale itself, although a bit too shark-like IMO (as seen in the movie poster), isn't all that bad. It's not the best CG ever, but it's respectable for a low-budget movie. However, much of the supporting special effects used throughout the movie is very poorly done, with no attention to detail.
For example, we've all seen underwater explosions on TV and in movies. When something blows up under water, the explosion has a very distinct look: there's cavitation, a bright flash, and lots of gas bubbles. Not in Moby Dick though... In Moby Dick, the underwater explosions are simply dry explosions taken from stock footage sloppily overlaid on top of a poorly rendered underwater scene. The result is an entirely unrealistic effect that precludes audience engagement in the story. I mean, there are Xbox games that have more convincing underwater action sequences.
Another example of the sloppy effects in this movie involves a scene in which a dead "school of squid" are supposedly being shown floating to the ocean surface--that's what is described in the dialog at least. But instead we're shown a shot of the ocean overlaid with blurry blown-up photos of 2 enormous-sized squids. And not only are the squids very poorly pasted into the scene (imagine a really bad Photoshop job), but as the camera pans (being shot from a moving helicopter), the squid cut- outs move completely out of sync with the background (the ocean surface). No attempt is made to synchronize the squid overlays with the camera movements or the corresponding perspective changes. And it's scenes like these that make the film look so amateurish and cheesy. You might expect this from a local cable access program or a Conan O'Brien skit, but not a feature film.
Sadly, as the movie intensifies and the stunts get ever more outrageous, the effort made by the filmmakers and special effects team seem to decrease. By the end of the movie, when the audience ought to be sitting on the edge of their seats, gripped by the explosive action as they approach the big finale, they're instead completely detached from the on-screen action, the sloppiness of the film having worn away any suspension of disbelief they had. So when the big finale does come, they're no longer emotionally invested in the characters or plot enough to care.
Although Barry Bostwick delivers an impassioned performance as Captain Ahab, Renee O'Connor (Gabrielle from TV's Xena), the female lead, is unconvincing in her role as a marine biologist. And for good measure, a few peripheral military characters also deliver some spectacularly bad acting during their few seconds on screen.
This is just a really shoddily made movie. There's no other way to put it. It would have been better had they cast Jack Black as Ahab and turned it into an intentionally cheesy comedy/spoof. However, this movie tries to take itself seriously and aims to be a big action monster movie, but the production team clearly weren't willing to make the effort for it to work.
I don't believe in such a thing as being untalented, just laziness and sloppiness. And that's what killed this movie. The sad part is, most of the problems don't seem to be budget related, and the individuals involved are clearly capable of producing quality work if they simply paid more attention to detail and set higher standards.
