I have no idea HOW they got the cast to do this hokum. It was frakking unbelievably awful.
I have no idea how they got the cast to sign on, I have no idea. Blackmail? Threats of torture? Kidnapping? But they were just wasted. They looked like they couldn't believe they had been forced to do such awful drivel.
What killed it was the story. The original was a wonderful novel. It has been done quite well at least three times before, with Gregory Peck, Patrick Stewart or Jack Aranson as Ahab. Orson Welles made a short of it. A new version is coming out with William Hurt as Ahab, and I look forward to it. Even if the script had been decent, I think Barry Bostwick would have been out of his league playing Ahab.
The special effects aren't that bad, but it takes so little to do that these days. What was AWFUL was how they used them. The whale looks to be the size of an island, simply bigger than any animal has ever been found to be.
I could go on and on and on. The only pleasure from it was like that of watching an airplane about to crash. You know it's a disaster in progress and it will be famously horrible.
