Can a creative team overcome the obvious technical and narrative difficulties inherent in the prospect of filming the Hemingway novella 'The Old Man and the Sea?' Well... no! But if you like your allegories inert, obvious and oh-so-serious, this might be for you. This is a movie-as-literature clunker, in the same vein as John Huston's 'Moby Dick.' The narrative is an allegorical sermon so thuddingly unsubtle that it's impossible to view it at anything but the symbolic level. <br /><br />This movie fails in the same way as 'The Spirit of St. Louis' because solo protagonists require an intrusive amount of narration and soliloquies to advance the narrative. In tOMatS, to preserve Hemingway's language, we get voice-over as omniscient narration (Spencer Tracy). We get voice-over in place of the old man's thoughts (Tracy again). And we get the old man talking to himself (ditto), saying things aloud that no one would ever actually speak. Tracy continually refers to himself in the third person, like he's Bob Dole. And he injects way too much sanctimony into what could have only worked (maybe) with a soft-sell. All these clumsy devices are like looking at plumbing; functional? certainly, but decidedly not art. It's also full of eye-rolling schlock; like a bird that lands on Tracy's finger to listen to one of countless sermons.<br /><br />The movie fails technically too. Rear projection is the overused gimmick decided on for the whole sea portion of this movie; but they cop out, and use it in land-based moments too, out of sheer laziness. Yeah, it's easier to get the footage in the can that way, but it looks like garbage. Why does everyone have an eerie blue tinge? Not once does the light that falls on Tracy match the coloring of sky he's sitting under. Also, if you want to rear-project most of your settings, and the only background is clouds, the cloud types needs to match in continuous moments, because viewers are going to notice that. The production is so sure of its own pure, righteous concept, that it can't be bothered with quality anywhere else.