Product: Moby Dick [VHS] (1998)
Rating: 1.0
Awful, Melville rotates more rapidly.
The tragedy of this film is that, as Patrick Stewart intones in the supplementary material, the vast majority of those seeing it will never read the book. Stewart implies that that is a good thing, and if the film were an artistically and factually valid adaptation of the novel, that would be true. However, it isn't. Why anyone would be motivated to read the novel by seeing this film is beyond me.There isn't space to go into all the deliberate errors and distortions, but a few will suffice to demonstrate the damage done to Melville's masterpiece.Ishmael had been a teacher, true, but he had also had three previous voyages as a seaman on merchant vessels, which Capt. Peleg treats with scorn as being completely unlike service on a whaling vessel. The point is, Ishmael is definitely not the green neophyte protrayed in the film.Peleg was a Quaker, as were most of the Nantucket whaling captains, although it is not clear in the novel if Ahab is also a Quaker. However, Peleg, who is clearly identified as a Quaker, uses "thee" and "thou" as second person singular in his conversation with Ishmael, not "ye", as in the film. This may seem a minor point, but it was a major issue for Quakers, many of whom had been martyred for their faith in earlier times. One of the many ironies noted by Melville in his novel is that men who would not raise a hand against another man even in self-defense were engaged in the horrible, brutal, bloody, terribly dangerous business of killing sperm whales for their oil, a point the movie misses entirely.Melville describes a mutiny on the ship Town-Ho, but while Starbuck contemplates shooting Ahab with a musket, after wrestling with his conscience he backs away from murder, and never openly threatens Ahab. Although Melville does not say so, there is evidence in the novel to suggest that Starbuck is a Quaker, which of course would heighten Starbuck's dilemma.There were no fights among the crew of the Pequod.No one deserted the Pequod.The crew never complained about "chowder" for supper. In fact, they would have thought chowder was a delicacy compared to their usual fare of salt pork and hard tack.Why put Fedallah in the film, if you're going to leave out his prophecy and death? Also, he was a Parsee and Ahab's boat crew were Filipino ("Manilla-men"), not Chinese.These distortions wouldn't be so bad if they didn't serve to turn the film into a sort of young person's adventure story. The novel deserves better, something made for adults, on the order of Master and Commander. Melville is no doubt now rotating even more rapidly in his grave than he was in 1956, when the first film version was made.