Wanted director to helm "revisionist" take on Moby-Dick

We’re not normally the types to hammer Hollywood on principle, but this has to be the most inexplicable thing we’ve heard in a long time. Timur Bekmambetov, the Kazakh-Russian zealot responsible for the (admittedly sort of awesome) flying cars and bomb-strapped rats in last summer’s Wanted, will craft a “revisionist” take on Moby-Dick, Herman Melville’s definitive work.

Other than the obvious irony that the most densely written classic volume in the English language will be adapted by a man with the shortest creative attention span this side of Michael Bay, the new version stands to adopt pretty much nothing but the names and the whale from the book, a la Robert Zemeckis’s "adaptation" of Beowulf last year.

Consider: Ishmael's narration is no more. Captain Ahab will become the Pequod's heroic leader (!). The story will be shot and told in the so-called “graphic novel” style, the CGI-jazzed format popularized by 300 and Sin City.

So, basically, this will be the pixel-driven story of a ship trying to kill an unhinged whale? This is exactly the sort of thing that puts Hollywood apologists on the defensive, but even we have to admit that with Wanted and the Watch films, Bekmambetov proved he knows his spectacle—even if that is quite possibly the most wrong-headed approach to Moby-Dick imaginable. The film is set for release from Universal in a few years, at which time 11th-grade lit teachers everywhere are in for some revelatory new term papers.

Related links:
Review: Wanted
Review: Night Watch
Wikipedia: Moby-Dick film adaptations

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