'Wanted' Director to Reimagine 'Moby Dick'

I'm not entirely thrilled to hear this claim: "Our vision isn't your grandfather's Moby Dick." That's Adam Cooper, who along with Bill Collage will write an adaptation of Herman Melville's classic that will be directed by Timur Bekmambetov (Wanted, Night Watch). "This is an opportunity to take a timeless classic and capitalize on the advances in visual effects to tell what at its core is an action-adventure revenge story," Cooper adds, reducing wildly and inappropriately the impact of many of Melville's major themes. If you think Bekmambetov doing classic literature is cool, I've got no argument. However, I don't think this is necessarily the right project, which is how I feel about Guy Ritchie taking over Sherlock Holmes. The aesthetic just isn't right.Of course, if the writers of Accepted and the Olsen Twins' New York Minute say Moby Dick is really an action-packed thrillride, then Bekmambetov is a good choice. The real question is, who in the hell let the guys who wrote an Olsen Twins movie take aim at Moby Dick? That's just poor judgment. Oh, and the answer to that real question is Universal. According to Variety, the writers will employ a "graphic novel-style" structure that will significantly alter Moby Dick. After all, what did Herman Melville know? He never enrolled in a screenwriting class. The first-person narration is out, which means "Call me Ishmael," arguably the best opening line in American literature, won't be included. Instead, we'll get a big-ass whale destroying boats. Yeah, that's what Moby Dick was all about. Our stance on remakes is well-documented. Essentially, remakes are not in and of themselves bad things. In many instances, an adaptation will help a work from one culture resonate more loudly with another that can't understand it on its original terms. Often, the film being remade was cheap and looked cheaper, but has enough going for it structurally to be worth revisiting. Some movies are great but feel dated, so remaking them doesn't hurt anything. I think War Games is a perfect candidate, and I'm surprised nobody's touched it. However, some movies are off limits; why remake Citizen Kane or The Godfather? Some movies make no sense as remakes because they simply weren't relevant enough the first time (paging The Amityville Horror and Poseidon). I think Moby Dick falls into the untouchable category if you're going to completely blow it up to suit your screenwriters, who appear to be latching on to a popular idiom just to make cash. I like Bekmambetov quite a bit as a director, but based on the wholesale changes the writers seem intent on making, I find it very hard to get behind this.

Comments

[Chris]

I think that if they did a Moby Dick movie using some new technology and took it seriously, it could be really good (they may have recently that I don't know about). But I do not like the idea of making it a graphic novel and essentially turning it into like a "Deep Blue Sea" or "Jaws" with a whale.