![]() I'm not sure how else to explain the hammy overacting, the grizzly beard, the cheesy dialogue delivered in a carefully cultivated "old salt" accent (ie. I'm convinced he's pulling out all the stops, aiming for an Emmy. William Hurt dominates every scene he appears in, and he appears in most of them. It also loses the narrator: on TV, Ishmael, a witty and endearing narrator, becomes a one-dimensional protagonist, totally overshadowed by Ahab. In doing so, it loses something of the quality of the story. This adaptation (and probably ANY adaptation) cuts to the chase, omitting these complex descriptions of whaling life in favour of characters and action, the meat and potatoes of Hollywood filmmaking. It tells you a lot about whales and whaling the motivations of the whalers, the camaraderie on board, the mechanics of capturingand dissecting the largest animal in the ocean and extracting theuseful stuff that keeps America burning. The tale is dramatic, it's action-packed, it's visual and it's exciting, but there's an awful lot in the original text that you have to leave out in order to film it coherently. ![]() I'm going to go out on a limb and say Moby Dick doesn't lend itself to film and TV adaptations. ![]()
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