While a delay is usually a bad sign for a finished film, it’s a bit different when a studio places it in prime awards season. Once set for a spring release this past year, Ron Howard‘s In the Heart of the Sea got a boost when Warner Bros. set it for an early December bow, and now today brings a new trailer as it re-emerges.
Led by Chris Hemsworth, the film takes inspiration from Herman Melville‘s novel Moby Dick, but is actually based on Nathaniel Philbrick‘s book In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex, which tracks a whaling ship in 1820 that go up against their prey and are stranded at sea.
Also reteaming with Howard and Hemsworth after Rush is cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle, and one can see his work below in the new trailer for the film also starring Benjamin Walker, Cillian Murphy, Ben Whishaw, Tom Holland, Brendan Gleeson, and Jordi Mollà.
In the winter of 1820, the New England whaling ship Essex was assaulted by something no one could believe: a whale of mammoth size and will, and an almost human sense of vengeance. The real-life maritime disaster would inspire Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick. But that told only half the story. “Heart of the Sea” reveals the encounter’s harrowing aftermath, as the ship’s surviving crew is pushed to their limits and forced to do the unthinkable to stay alive. Braving storms, starvation, panic and despair, the men will call into question their deepest beliefs, from the value of their lives to the morality of their trade, as their captain searches for direction on the open sea and his first mate still seeks to bring the great whale down.
In the Heart of the Sea opens on December 11th.