In the Heart of the Sea This film begins by baiting you that the whalers upon the Essex did something so egregious by eating fellow dead crew members, that they maybe deserved to be eternally shamed by it. But the experience of the film is that cannibalism was almost an exploration of the amount of leeway, the permission—what one might theoretically in fact thereafter get away with—granted one when one pulls back from doing the one thing truly punishment-worthy. Truly punishment-worthy, is the unwillingness to backdown from the pretension that there may actually be no limits to how much humanity might claim for themselves out of nature. You can come close, real close, to this pretension, but if you're actually willing to go all the way then Nature will ultimately wake up, reveal just how sized She actually is, and squash your ass. The setting is New England, the 1820s. The whaling industry is full-bloom confidence, and is indispensable to the obvious prosperit...