Director Mike Barker (Butterfly on a Wheel, A Good Woman) assembled an impressive cast for this TV movie adaptation of Herman Melville's classic novel, Moby Dick. Ethan Hawke, William Hurt, Gillian Anderson, and a cameo from Donald Sutherland make this real a parade of stars. A person could easily slip and think he was sitting through a theatrical release, with all these heavyweight actors. The history of films based on Melville's novel includes similarly famous actors like Patrick Stewart and Gregory Peck as Captain Ahab, so there's good precedent for this treatment. Charlie Cox, as Ishmael, is perhaps the most enjoyable character on camera during the three hours that Moby Dick runs its course. Good thing the casting was done right here, considering Ishmael's central role in the story. The epic nature of Moby Dick has been dutifully translated, but the parity does a disservice to viewers. Instead of three hours of progressive build-up to the cataclysmic ending we know from the print version, Barker's Moby Dick struggles through the thickest part of its narrative bell-curve before wrapping up in deepest anticlimax.

It seems safe enough after 150 years to relax about spoilers, doesn't it? Moby Dick is one of the prototypes in modern Western narrative, a story of revenge, madness, and man against nature. The threads running through it include debate over the value of religious observance and man's place under God; the futility of man's attempts to dominate the natural world; the blindness of fanaticism and vengeance; the temptation and abuse of power. Pick any dramatic sitcom or film in the past 100 years and you'll find the same territory being mined, but Melville's choice of imagery stands out as particularly exotic. The white whale, Moby Dick, pitted against Captain Ahab in the far reaches of the ocean. All this imagery is handled extremely well in the film, with sets and costumes and effects that largely work. Barker even taps into some of the horror implicit in the story, showing us the view Moby Dick himself might have had of boats rowing over him in dark water laced with sunlight. Also effective are the nighttime scenes where water takes on the look of black stone, and the mighty storm toward the end where Ahab appears to be literally driving his crew into Hell.

The disappointment is in wooden pacing, snippets of dialogue in non sequitur scenes. No doubt there is a lot of material taken very literally from Melville's novel, but its presentation never creates the desired mood. Depictions of the crew's lagging faith in Ahab, followed by a tub-thumping speech from him that whips them again into a fervor, happen no less than four or five times. The first two are interesting, but the others are wooden. Hurt is broody and distant from the first time we see him, progressing to a state of apparent psychedelic intoxication by the end of the film. He's a pitiful character, not at all frightening compared to the whale. The dangerous quality of Ahab from the novel is diluted not by poor acting, but by poor pacing and editing. We're constantly jumping from one character to another, as if Barker was trying to do right by every bit of the book's insight in 184 minutes. The most effective theme throughout this film version of Moby Dick is the shifting turmoil of loyalty among Ahab's followers. We end up with The Caine Mutiny plus a white whale, rather than a new vision of Melville's classic. Perhaps high-school teachers will find this a useful way to cement the book's imagery in the heads of their students, but those of us not bound by classroom assignments are still better off watching Peck's depiction of Ahab from 1956.