The Real Moby-Dick Goes Berserk in Final In the Heart of the Sea Trailer

Ron Howard's In The Heart of the Sea comes out on December 11, which couldn't be soon enough for us. Based on the real voyage of the whaleship The Essex in 1820, which inspired one of the greatest novels of all time, Herman Melville's "Moby-Dick," In the Heart of the Sea promises to show not only the epic battle between the ship's crew and the seemingly malevolent, vengeful sperm whale, but what happened after the whale decimated their ship.

Based on Nathaniel Philbrick's book of the same name, In the Heart of the Sea follows the crew of the Essex not only through their battle with the enraged bull sperm whale, but to what they had to do to survive when they were shipwrecked on an island. The film was shot at Leavesden Studios in the U.K., as well as on location on the isalnds of La Gomera and Lanzarote, in Spain's Canary Islands. The cast, which includes Chris Hemsworth, Benjamin Walker, Cillian Murphy, Tom Holland, Ben Whishaw, and Brendan Gleeson, had to undergo some seriously bleak training to take on their roles of starving sailors—Hemsworth told Jimmy Kimmel that they were put on a diet of 500-600 calories a day to lose weight.

This trailer introduces us to Melville himself (played by Ben Whishaw), who wants Thomas Nickerson (Brendan Gleeson), to tell him what happened when he was a cabin boy on the Essex, and if the rumors are true. What befell Nickerson and the rest of the crew of the Essex would be hard to believe if it weren't true—there's a reason it inspired Melville to write one of the defining classics of literature, with arguably the greatest monster ever written. Melville left out a huge portion of the tragedy, however, which Howard's film will get into.

Melville did, however, capture the whale in his inimitable style. Only unlike Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Melville's monster was real.