Just watched In the Heart of the Sea and am very glad I didn’t drag myself to the theater for it a few months ago. Howard tweaked details and shifted emphasis all over the place, transforming the bleakness and irony of the book into this phony inspirational survival narrative. In real life Owen Chase was a borderline sociopathic son of a bitch, George Pollard was a criminally inept captain, the survivors were profoundly screwed up for the rest of their lives, and the whole reason they needed to resort to cannibalism was that they went way out of their way to avoid islands they believed to be populated by cannibals. That’s the movie I wanted to see. Instead, it was a by-the-numbers resolve-in-the-face-of-impossible-odds flick with some admittedly cool whaling scenes and a superficial resemblance to a book I really liked.