"Moby Dick" is my favorite novel. I have read it many times. William Hurt and Ethan Hawke are two of my favorite actors. So I had high hopes for this movie version. My hopes were diminished slightly in the opening scene where Ishmael, the main character, saves Pip, the future cabin boy, from a beating on the way to Nantucket and brings him along. That scene never happened in the book. Pip doesn't show up until they are all on the ship, but I know that some liberties need to be taken in a translation from novel to movie, so I dismissed it. Then my hopes were completely dashed over the next 3 hours. In those 3 hours there were about 15 minutes worth of film that were actually taken from the book. It is as though the screenwriter read the back cover of the novel, where it says that it is the story of an obsessed captain chasing a white whale and wrote a completely new story based on nothing but that. One of the more obvious things is that, in the book, Ahab, the captain, doesn't even appear until days into the sea voyage when he finally emerges from his cabin. In the movie the first half hour or more involves him at home with his wife and son, neither of which are even in the book at all. Even the climactic ending has been changed a great deal. It would take up too much space to write about all the other things that are completely different from the novel. Basically this is not a film version of "Moby Dick" at all, it is an invention of the screenwriter, based on a similar idea.
Forgetting all that, the movie itself, as a movie, is just not that good. The direction is OK and the performances are all relatively good, except for Hurt, who is, as another reviewer said "hammy" and "cheesy". He should have played a sandwich instead of Ahab. The special effects are sub par, considering what can be done nowadays. The whales shown often don't even make a splash when they dive under. They just disappear. The plot is thin with none of the characters really developed in any way, except perhaps for Starbuck the first mate, who is the only one in the movie who seems to even realize what is going on. Two earlier versions, the 1956 version with Gregory Peck and the 1998 version with Patrick Stewart, despite their own flaws were much better movies and more faithful adaptations of the novel than this one. So watch those, or even better read the book.
Forgetting all that, the movie itself, as a movie, is just not that good. The direction is OK and the performances are all relatively good, except for Hurt, who is, as another reviewer said "hammy" and "cheesy". He should have played a sandwich instead of Ahab. The special effects are sub par, considering what can be done nowadays. The whales shown often don't even make a splash when they dive under. They just disappear. The plot is thin with none of the characters really developed in any way, except perhaps for Starbuck the first mate, who is the only one in the movie who seems to even realize what is going on. Two earlier versions, the 1956 version with Gregory Peck and the 1998 version with Patrick Stewart, despite their own flaws were much better movies and more faithful adaptations of the novel than this one. So watch those, or even better read the book.