2010: Moby Dick
A good number of films about a dozen I believe were made to adapt the story of Moby Dick by Herman Melville. I only can say that my favorite twisting of the classic plot was John Huston’s 1950s rendition with Gregory Peck as Captain Ahab or a dislocated crazed maniac, who loses a leg on the Quint’s huge whale attack, only to drift further into madness in his sleepless attempts to find and murder the gigantic beast.
In this remake of the classic story a modern version of Captain Ahab, played by Barry Bostwick well-known from The Rocky Horror Picture Show, is now commanding a submarines equipped with nuclear arms, which he diverts for his selfish need to chase down the prehistoric whale that had attacked a submarine where he was a RMO. It becomes clear to his entire crew and a marine biologist he abducts that he is quite mad and ready to forfeit his life in pursuit of and vengeance on Moby Dick, the whale that robbed him of his metal leg, along with the lives of his crew and probably his ship as well.
I must say, with more than a handful of Asylum Productions torture movies that I’ve experienced in the past (they do have some fun names, like Mega Piranha, Meteor Apocalypse, Snakes on a Train and AVH: Alien V Hunter), I did not have high expectations from this version of Moby Dick shot underwater. The movie has its weaknesses the cast is quite inconsistent in terms of acting, the script has too many cheesy lines and the visual effects are below par, but it managed to keep my focus and even made me chuckle to myself on a couple of occasions so I guess it cannot have been that bad.
I think its main problem was that it was quite obvious that the producers had greater ambitions than that budget, which was why I guess, SFX and set design had to be cut, and yes that shows at some point. One of those moments for instance, when supposedly underwater and many meters down, there seems to be illumination from inside the submarine, which diminishes some of the supposedly tense and claustrophobic moments I believe the director was aiming for as ‘tense’ or traumatic.
Also the ending is somewhat of a compromise with a non-combatant protagonist, Dr. Michelle Herman, who comes out of the double nuclear torpedo that the submarine fires when it runs headlong against the atoll around which the climactic battle is positioned. Unfortunately, as you would expect, Captain Ahab’s luck runs out and he sinks deep into the ocean well, unless they make another film. Now that’s an interesting notion!
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