2010: Moby Dick

This is one of the worst movies I have ever seen. I am so shocked half-way through it- that I had to stop- and go back and look over reviews- to make sure- super sure- that maybe what I am seeing is a comedy. No- it's just that bad. The cgi is so tragically bad- that in one scene- you see a closeup of a whale's eye and see the wiremesh show up because of low polycount. Wow.

I think this is a treasure of a movie for film students- It must be mindblowing to them how it is possible that these fools got funded to make this crap- and then it actually got distributed- amazing. If I had made this movie- I would not have distributed it- out of sheer shame. I think the actors probably looked at this movie afterwards in its entirety and walked out before it ended.

I am just glad that Herman Melville is not alive to see what they have done to his immortal tale of Ahab and his White Whale. I thought the film went over the top when they were using names like Ahab and Moby Dick, but when they added the character names of Starbuck, Queg Qheg, what really got me was the name of the submarine, U.S. S. Pequod, now that is just a little much. I am just glad that Herman Melville has been dead for over 100 years or he may come back from the grave and let us know what he thinks. At least they didn't have a character named Ishmael.

Still, as bad as that is, I find the film compelling, maybe that's because I have such a craving for a stupid horror film. It's worth a watch if you don't expect too much from the film.

This take on the classic literary masterpiece Moby-Dick does not deserve to be even mentioned in the same sentence. Herman Melville is turning in his grave right now. Just about the only thing that's related to the book are the names of the characters. The story is set in a present day submarine, features some of the worst acting imaginable, grade school quality production, and just about the worst script.

And the worst part about it is that it takes itself seriously. I am sure it will quickly make it's way to IMDb's bottom 100. I am just happy I didn't waste any money on this pile of crap.

I have no idea HOW they got the cast to do this hokum. It was frakking unbelievably awful.

I have no idea how they got the cast to sign on, I have no idea. Blackmail? Threats of torture? Kidnapping? But they were just wasted. They looked like they couldn't believe they had been forced to do such awful drivel.

What killed it was the story. The original was a wonderful novel. It has been done quite well at least three times before, with Gregory Peck, Patrick Stewart or Jack Aranson as Ahab. Orson Welles made a short of it. A new version is coming out with William Hurt as Ahab, and I look forward to it. Even if the script had been decent, I think Barry Bostwick would have been out of his league playing Ahab.

The special effects aren't that bad, but it takes so little to do that these days. What was AWFUL was how they used them. The whale looks to be the size of an island, simply bigger than any animal has ever been found to be.

I could go on and on and on. The only pleasure from it was like that of watching an airplane about to crash. You know it's a disaster in progress and it will be famously horrible.

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.