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Title: More Huston than Melville.
Review: More a lean Hemingway adventure than Melville's mad encyclopaedia - and even more a typical Huston fable about men and failure. Ahab the maimed tries to recover wholeness by destroying his destroyer, a non-starter of an idea. It needed someone with a less cautious imagination to make this, someone who didn't care so much about plot, who could plumb the depths, soar the heights, the rites, the lunatic, magical, incantatory pagan/religious/philosophical mish mash. Only the eerie scene of Queequig's decision to die even comes close. The whaling sequences are the best, full of a real, almost documentary danger that brings the film nearer to Herzog. Herzog doing 'Moby Dick'? Now there's a thought...Kinski as Ahab...mmm.
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