The Only Whale Is Essex [Review: White Space]

Space... the final food frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Essex, it's continuing mission to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new recipes, to boldly eat what no man has eaten before.

White Space, also released as Beyond White Space, is a 2018 sci-fi movie. It is the future, and mankind has taken up space fishing. Captain Richard Bentley (Holt McCallany) commands the starship Essex and its dysfunctional, squabbling and unfeasibly good-looking crew. Their mission: to catch space-crabs (these are giant, edible asteroid-dwelling creatures actually called Clickers, not some sort of space STD) under the watchful eye of inspector Navarro (Zulay Henao). However Bentley's father perished seeking Tien Lung, a legendary dragon-like space creature, and Bentley is obsessed with revenge. Yes, this is another sci-fi take on Moby Dick. And no, this is not going to end well.

The best aspects of White Space are the ship and the crew. The Essex is well designed inside and out, it has character - part submarine, part trawler, it's dark and atmospheric, there's plenty of blue lighting which is important in sci-fi, and by the end of the film you can feel reasonably familiar with it. Is it named after my home county of Essex, England, famed for its orange lifeforms? Or for the various towns or counties also called Essex in the US? Perhaps it was named after David Essex, who finally receives the acclaim he so deserves for the song "A Winter's Tale" in the 22nd century. We will never know. The visual effects are great for the various spaceships, a little less great for the creatures.

I enjoyed getting to know the crew - interesting characters and interesting relationships, although Hawthorne (Mike Genovese), the marinated ancient mariner, is a bit of an annoying cliché. The cast are relative unknowns, at least to me. Perhaps I should get out more.

I actually think this film would have been better if it had just focussed on the captain and crew with their various obsessions, and let their tensions, arguments and misbehaviour go even further - but instead the writers throw in such highly original elements as Space Pirates (TM)! and a Parasitic Life Form (TM)! which add little and get in the way of the story.

White Space is a decent B-movie, and as Moby Dick sci-fi adaptations go I found it more enjoyable than 2010: Moby Dick. It gets enough right to be watchable despite its flaws, and manages to reel in a leviathan 3 stars out of 5.

Score: 3 out of 5 stars

All movies reviewed on the Sci-Fi Gene blog are given a score of 3 out of 5 stars

The Rime Of The Ancient Submariner [Review: 2010: Moby Dick]

I'm writing this review carefully: The Asylum's 2010: Moby Dick is not the only modern adaptation of a seafaring fantasy in the village, and I'll be sure to hold up Jack Black's Gulliver's Travels re-boot to the same standards.

Moby Dick is the kind of nonsense The Asylum loves to make over and over again: oversized ancient sea-creatures, submarines, beautiful brainy women and crazed soldiers. Let's take a look at each:

The sea-creature is Moby Dick, a survivor from prehistoric times of a whale species that ate other whales. MD is a giant, white, toothy CGI creation with intelligent black eyes and a sonar signature "like a hole in the sea."

The crazed soldier is Captain Ahab, a submarine commander who survived a brush with MD, losing a leg - and a large percentage of his sanity - in the process. The white whale becomes his bête noir and he spends the last twenty years of his naval career scheming to get his own back. Ahab is played by Shakespeare-class actor Barry Bostwick who puts everything into his performance and then some. It doesn't stop there, either, at least according to the Making Of featurette: it seems Mr. B wasn't too impressed by the Asylum's props department, so turned up on set with his own kick-ass mega-harpoon that he'd knocked up in his garage the night before. As the demented captain fighting to maintain the loyalty of his crew, Ahab also gets the best of the script - of course the best lines of all are those borrowed from Herman Melville.

The beautiful brainy woman is marine biologist and whalespeak expert Dr. Michelle Herman (see what they did there?) who is kidnapped by Ahab to help him in his quest. Michelle is played by Renee O'Connor, who some of you may recall as Xena's "close friend" Gabrielle - she's a pro and gives a great performance but is underused: her main job is to sit and look pretty wearing a pair of headphones, then suddenly notice things on the sonar that no-one else can see or hear. In this respect the lack of imagination on the part of the writers is inexcusable.

Ahab's submarine, the Peaquod, has been secretly upgraded in preparation for the day when Ahab goes rogue and hunts down the whale. Externally it's a CGI job and a poor one - rarely convincing. Internally it's better although not claustrophobic enough for a sub, and I think I recognized a few re-deployed sets from the Transmorphers underground city. It's a time of austerity so recycling is good, right? Lucky Dr. Michelle gets to sleep in the torpedo bay with nuclear missiles hanging from chains above her head.

2010: Moby Dick is not Shakespeare, however it is an enjoyable hour and a half. Despite the flaws, I would recommend it on the strength of Bostwick's performance and the attempt to stay in touch with, or at least make use of, the original story. In particular the arch-nemesis relationship between Ahab and MD is very well staged, and I think this gives it a bit of an edge over the many other Asylum creature features. I guess we should look forward to The Asylum's re-boot of The Ancient Mariner, featuring a 200-foot prehistoric man-eating Mega Albatross and Tiffany as the crypto-ornithologist who holds the key to defeating it.