How They Made the White Whale in Ron Howard’s In the Heart of the Sea

“There she blows! There she blows! A hump like a snow hill! It is Moby Dick!”

This is the moment in Herman Melville's iconic "Moby-Dick" that the titular white whale is spotted, the demon that mad Captain Ahab has made the Pequod's suicidal mission. It's one of the most breathtaking moments in American literature, coming on page 624 (in the Barnes & Noble Classics edition, at least), on chapter 133. For the final three chapters of arguably the greatest piece of literature in the American canon,

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,

In the Heart of the Sea Trailer Introduces Real Whale Behind “Moby-Dick”

Maybe you haven’t read Herman Melville’s “Moby-Dick,” but you know Moby-Dick. That is, you know at a minimum that Moby Dick’s a killer whale (you might even know he's a sperm whale), and you also probably know that one of the things Melville used his monstrous creation to illustrate was the implacable power of nature, and man’s puniness in the face of it. What you might not know is that Melville’s masterpiece was based on the accounts he'd heard and read of the doomed whaleship Essex in 1920,