The Hooverville Hexagon: Mighty Like a Whale

 

Some reflections on being swallowed: or, what audiences will swallow.

 

Your Daily Warning That

Halloween Is Coming

by Galaxy Babe

When the eggs are looking spooky, it's time to look over your shoulder for ghosts. Or at least stock up on candy.

 

 

 

Weather Report from Scotland

by Paigetheoracle

What was the storm like? Well, the river got a bit wild.

 

A Linguistic Complaint

by DG

Achtung, deutsche User!

Bei der Startseite starten.

Suchwort einfach hier

in den Chat eintippen.

Googeln macht Spaß!

 

I stare at the computer in disgust.

For this I got two degrees in

Germanic languages?

O tempora. O moray eels.

24 Lies a Second:

The Gut Life

By Awix

Awix has more reviews on his regular blog. The Editor has no desire to see this movie but found the review really entertaining and – as a former language instructor whose students once translated the Book of Jonah as 'and the whale barfed him up' – deeply satisfying.

Incidentally, Popular Science has a lot to say on the subject of what might happen if you were accidentally swallowed by a sperm whale. Personally, I intend to avoid the situation if at all possible. I'd rather go to Nineveh with an American passport.

It is that time of year when things are traditionally quiet in terms of cinema releases: all the big summer releases have usually run their course, it's a little bit early for Halloween-related movies, and only the most optimistic awards films are doing the rounds. So you tend to get a lot of mid-budget genre or genre-adjacent films. As such it can be a little difficult for these films to cut through and find an audience. If we accept as a maxim that a striking premise is always a plus in these situations, then the odds are presumably better than most for Brian Duffield's Whalefall. (Duffield has a sort of interesting CV considering he wrote or co-wrote (uncredited in a few instances) Underwater, Predator: Badlands and Tron: Ares, and produced Cocaine Bear.)

Whalefall is a bit more respectable-looking than most of these, being based on a novel by Daniel Kraus (this is one of those instances where the film rights to the book were sold before it was even published) and not featuring quite the same sort of outlandish elements as some of the films we've already mentioned. Austin Abrams, who as an actor I feel falls into the category of ‘quite like young Holland only cheaper', plays Jay, a young man returning to the family home in California one year on from the suicide of his father Mitt (played by Josh Brolin, who's in the film rather more than that sentence might lead you to expect). The two of them had a difficult relationship, with Mitt being a rugged, self-reliant, outdoorsy, Hemingway-ish type, and Jay being… not those things. Clearly Jay has issues to work through.

But before he can do that, he decides to go scuba diving one last time as a sort of exercise in catharsis (it was his father's great passion, and a lung disease forcing him to give it up was the main reason he killed himself). Off Jay splashes, away from the beach, into the kelp forests, and finally he peeks over the edge of what I guess is the drop-off of the continental shelf into the stygian depths beyond. But, as any good Nietzschean can tell you, when you look into the abyss, the abyss gazes back at you, and coming to take a closer look at Jay are a giant squid and a sperm whale (the whale is also intent on eating the squid – this is a circle of life thing, I expect).

Well, much of the CGI in this movie is very good, and the tussle between the whale and the squid in the kelp forest is quite impressive. Unfortunately the squid decides it doesn't want to be the only one who gets eaten and grabs on to Jay for moral support. The only upshot of this is that Jay and the squid both get eaten by the whale in fairly quick succession. What a downer, eh? So much for the grieving process! Roll credits.

Except not. Jay recovers consciousness in the whale's stomach, which is fortunately filled with various things that are bioluminescent (otherwise this film would have made a great piece of radio). And the rest of the film concerns his attempts to go from being on the inside of the whale to its outside, again, and the hallucinatory memories of his father which this experience provokes.

We should probably take a moment to consider the standing of this film and its credibility. The pertinent facts are that no-one has ever made the journey into a whale's stomach and lived to tell the tale, not least because even a sperm whale's throat isn't wide enough for an adult human. People have been in the mouths of whales for a few seconds, usually as the result of a misunderstanding, and been spat out, but that's all, but basically all of this is very highly improbable. But then so is the entire plot of Jaws: the Revenge and much of the Idris-Elba-gets-chased-by-a-lion-for-90-minutes movie Beast, too, so it's not like Whalefall is alone in this.

The difference, if there is one, is that Jaws: the Revenge, Beast, and many other improbable nature-based thrillers are schlocky genre movies so a degree of preposterousness is priced in with them. Whalefall aspires to be a moving, thoughtful meditation on fatherhood and grief, as well as a film about a dude being eaten by a whale, so the temptation is to hold it to a different, higher standard.

Well, to be honest I thought all the father-son relationship stuff was a bit hokey and sentimental, although the performances are decent enough (I'm starting to think that Josh Brolin hasn't had a role as good as Thanos in a long while, though). The third act has a development where Brolin sort of symbolically and metaphorically turns into the sperm whale, which I found at least as dubious as the bit with the talking whales in the Avatar sequels, but some people are suckers for that kind of thing, I expect.

Much more interesting me was the Fantastic Voyage angle of the story, with Jay's adventures inside the whale (probably not a George Orwell reference). The film isn't really being advertised as such but this is essentially a very unusual survival horror story, with our hero desperately attempting to ensure he doesn't get chewed up or digested by his… host? Captor? We seem to have reached the limits of standard vocabulary. There is even a fight to the death inside the whale, which I wouldn't have expected.

The film isn't afraid of ickiness, and taps into that connection between things of the deep ocean and a sort of squirming disquiet (as you might expect from the writer of the Lovecraft-themed Underwater). Things do get quite grisly, with various tentacles and pools of digestive acid and gribbly little things turning up; I get the impression the film has been edited down to reduce the amount of detail we see of Jay's various injuries, in order to keep a more accessible certificate.

There are also things here that you just don't see very often, if at all, at the movies – quite apart from the internal organs of a whale, there's a battle between orcas and cachalots which is, if nothing else, visually interesting. This goes a long way to make up for the less than entirely fascinating emotional storyline about the main character's parental issues (in some respects this is a companion piece to H is for Hawk from earlier this year – not quite W is for Whale, but getting there).

I don't think this is a tremendously distinguished movie, but there are plenty of films which are just as hokey and sentimental in their emotional content without getting too much stick for it. I was never bored during it, and frequently pleasantly surprised – if nothing else it is a valuable reminder that, often, originality and novelty can take you a long way.

 

 

TTFN,

 Dmitri Gheorgheni, Editor