OK, I saw this on cable and only recorded the 2nd half. Considering the other reviewers' bashing of the 1st half, I should be thankful. I really liked Hurt's performance. I had a feeling that Ahab was vulnerable. Maybe that is not historically accurate, because ship's captains are often portrayed as being in absolute control. However, if you are leading your crew to certain doom and neglecting the easy money, then you are likely to have an insurrection. The CGI was fine, no complaints. Its just hard to capture the enormity of the whale, and how terrifying it must be in a small boat with an unpredictable giant toying with you. Its a giant you can only catch a glimpse of in real life, so how do you portray that on a screen ? I just with the there had been a slower ending. After that powerful conclusion, it should have drawn out the scene of Ishmael floating in a vast empty sea to let the audience digest the powerful and terrible tragedy that has just occurred. The sad singing at the end could have really set the tone, but instead they just rolled the credits. If only I could re-edit this film, this could be the one that is required viewing for all English students after reading the book.

It seems that each filmed version of Moby-Dick is compelled to be worse than the one before and that each embodier of the partially disembodied Ahab must make his predecessor seem better, not just in the distance of time but also in distanced performance. Who will underperform William Hurt I hope never to see. Each scriptwriter also must feel a need to demonstrate the superiority of Melville's original, both in his concept and execution. The most recent version appears somewhat like a Second City take on Moby-Dick Meets The Outsiders: all the tortured Jugendangst! Ethan Hawke does do a good C. Thomas Howell sendup, but Hawke should rather be doing a good performance of a first mate, one who is one step below the ship's master. Even the Pequod gets nonverisimilitude. A square-rigged whaler gets turned into a bark. If people cared enough to write, finance, film, and present what is generally regarded as a if not the preeminent work of American fiction, why was care and cash not more carefully scripted and directed? Even the cgi attempt at the whale of whales had the look of an audition submission for an early ScyFy project.

Let me start by quoting Mad Magazine: Call me Fishmeal.As a confirmed middlebrow and devoted Melvillephile, I wish to thank everyone involved in this production for a great, worthy and exciting iteration. A welcome addition to the pantheon. Visually enthralling...and good score.I cant claim to deeply understand Melville -- but i can claim to love him and his work -- in my way. i have been to Arrowhead in Pittsfield MA 2x. I have read a lot of his writing. I love Billy Budd, novella and movie. And I was delighted to just watch my 3rd or 4th version of the majestic and elusive Moby Dick, which i have read 1.5 times and audio-listened once.So.....review? Well because I try not to be doctrinaire, I was fine to "suck up" the sometimes bold liberties taken by the screenwriter, i think mainly in the first hour or so. i got the chills when the camera first panned on the Nantucket dock. i enjoyed revisiting father mapple's ship-as-church. i loved Elijah, Queequeg, Stubb, Steelkilt, and others. Ahab and Ishmael were very good. Mrs Ahab was good, and Starbuck got better when things started to get really diceyi'm sorry but Ahab sometimes looks like a HS cheerleader revving up the team and the fans. i would have rather spent 90 seconds looking at puzzled faces of the crew as Ahab went more and more bonkers, than hear lots of the crew's pep-rally-like, anti-moby dick chanting. I thought of the koolaid distributed by Jim Jones in 1978 at suicidal Jonestown -- when I saw Ahab pass the drinks on the equally suicidal Pequod. i thought of Billy Budd (Melville), and the idea of the follower willing to die for the leaderI thought of billy (and Terrence Stamp) proclaiming 'god bless capain vere' I thought of Benito Cereno...and the amazing steps sometimes taken by the enslaved - in pathetic contrast to the steps not taken by members of the fatally cowed crew of the Pequod -- enabled by a pathetic and self-loathing StarbuckI thought of Jack and Rose when Starbuck last spoke w Pip-- It has many great visual effects, including moby's jaw-dropping rise from the sea at the end of Part 1, and the shattering moment in Part 2 when the great white whale wreaks its own revenge on one of the lowered boats of Ahab's Pequod. The look on the faces of the other crew members says it all I remain a middlebrow, but I do know enough to say that Herman Melville has much to teach us about leadership, sacrifice, power, subservience, rebellion, intercultural relations...And in Moby Dick, we also have a story about humans' unwinnable efforts to conquer nature -- about the emergence of industrial capitalism in the mid 19th c. US -- in any case, as i dip again and again into Melville and Moby Dick, my attention draws more and more...........toward the relationship between the crew and ahab (without minimizing other deep and essential plot elements)melville says: watch this crew get misled to its own death, dear reader - and don't let this happen to youto all involved in this production, i would again say thank you for helping your viewers lock arms with Herman Melville in the never-ending quest for mutual understanding

After non-stop disappointment at the movies this Summer, the latest being Cowboys & Aliens for so many reasons, this "freebie" on Encore came as a very pleasant surprise. William Hurt as Ahab was rock solid and while this may sound like heresy, was more fully rounded and interesting than Gregory Peck, whose monolithic performance embarrassed him in later years, and he didn't mind saying so in numerous interviews. (Still he had that great baritone voice) The supporting cast was fine (Ethan Hawk a bit too contemporary) and the production values commendable given the constraints of the budget. Liberties were taken from the classic novel but far from a dumbing down. And the finale, a virtual battle with the white leviathon was surprisingly effective if not all together a solid action set-piece....... far more so than anything in the aforementioned Cowboys and Aliens. I would have to say its worth checking out for most tastes and nothing too objectionable for kids over seven if they can deal with the hunting of whales.