A sprawling, sometimes unfocused, usually fascinating and occasionally moving look at American whaling from the early days of the colonies, to the beginning of the 20th century. It does a very good job of capturing both the awful brutality, and incredible danger of the hunts.
There are some talking heads, but much more is a very pleasing mix of old drawings, photographs, and modern photography of scrimshaw and whaling boats (often not re- enactments as much as just striking images of the vessels at sea).
For the first while the film focuses on the early history of U.S. whaling, explaining how important it was to the industrial revolution, being the major source of oil for lighting and lubrication before the days of ground based petroleum products It also explains how the riches from whaling literally paid for much of the nation's expansion.
It then switches tacks to tell the harrowing true story of the doomed whaling ship "The Essex", a story which helped prompt Herman Melville to write "Moby Dick". The film then spends a good deal of time on "Moby Dick" itself, with some excellent dramatic readings by Robert Sean Leonard, and the examination of the story and it's themes (with spoilers for those not familiar with the book). It also briefly traces how "Moby Dick" fared in the literary world, and then circles back around for a cursory mention of the end of traditional whaling and the rise of industrial whaling in the early 20th century.
For me, this last transition is handled too quickly and off-handedly, the revelation that whale populations were far more depleted by the 20th century whaling than in all the whaling done before – which feels contradictory to what the film had been implying up until then.
But those flaws are minor, and overall this is a very good, if slightly scattered, look at a way of life that was a far bigger part of America's history than I ever realized.
There are some talking heads, but much more is a very pleasing mix of old drawings, photographs, and modern photography of scrimshaw and whaling boats (often not re- enactments as much as just striking images of the vessels at sea).
For the first while the film focuses on the early history of U.S. whaling, explaining how important it was to the industrial revolution, being the major source of oil for lighting and lubrication before the days of ground based petroleum products It also explains how the riches from whaling literally paid for much of the nation's expansion.
It then switches tacks to tell the harrowing true story of the doomed whaling ship "The Essex", a story which helped prompt Herman Melville to write "Moby Dick". The film then spends a good deal of time on "Moby Dick" itself, with some excellent dramatic readings by Robert Sean Leonard, and the examination of the story and it's themes (with spoilers for those not familiar with the book). It also briefly traces how "Moby Dick" fared in the literary world, and then circles back around for a cursory mention of the end of traditional whaling and the rise of industrial whaling in the early 20th century.
For me, this last transition is handled too quickly and off-handedly, the revelation that whale populations were far more depleted by the 20th century whaling than in all the whaling done before – which feels contradictory to what the film had been implying up until then.
But those flaws are minor, and overall this is a very good, if slightly scattered, look at a way of life that was a far bigger part of America's history than I ever realized.