Wanted : Whale

I remember a few years back reading in, er, I think, Premiere, that filmmaker Brian Helgeland wanted to reunite his cast of ‘’A Knight’s Tale” – Heath Ledger, Mark Addy, Paul Bettany and so on – for a new film version of Moby Dick, with Ledger playing Ahab. That could’ve been fun… but alas, will never happen now. Not that Hollywood has given up on Moby Dick though.

Timur Bekmambetov, the Russian filmmaker behind “Wanted”, has signed on to direct a new take on the Man vs. Whale classic – something on a pretty grand-scale, by the sounds.

“Our vision isn’t your grandfather’s Moby Dick,” screenwriter Adam Cooper, who penned the script with Bill Collage, explained. “This is an opportunity to take a timeless classic and capitalize on the advances in visual effects to tell what at its core is an action-adventure revenge story.”

The trade says :

The writers revere Melville’s original text,  but their graphic novel-style version will change the structure. Gone is the first-person narration by the young seaman Ishmael, who observes how Ahab’s obsession with killing the great white whale overwhelms his good judgment as captain.

This change will allow them to depict the whale’s decimation of other ships prior to its encounter with Ahab’s Pequod, and Ahab will be depicted more as a charismatic leader than a brooding obsessive.