In The Heart Of The Sea, film review: Ron Howard's bland voyage is no Moby-Dick

It's 100ft long, it's as white as alabaster and Ron Howard can't quite work out what it represents. This is the sperm whale ("There she blows!") that attacks the Essex, a Nantucket whaling ship, with such devastating consequences in Howard's new seafaring yarn.

In Herman Melville's Moby-Dick (which was inspired by the story of the Essex), the whale wasn't just a whale. It was a mythical creature: a symbol of Captain Ahab's vengeful obsession. Melville's story had the force of an Old Testament fable and its main characters had biblical names. Nathaniel Philbrick's book In the Heart of the Sea: the Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex, on which the film is based, was all about deconstructing the myth of Moby Dick and reconstructing the story – astonishing enough in its own right – of what really happened to the Essex and its sailors.

Howard seems caught in some no-man's land between the poetic force of Melville's novel and the discursive academic approach of Philbrick. He can't work out whether he is making a ripping yarn about madness, hubris and a great white whale or a sober, factually based account of the incident that Melville so embellished. It soon turns out that Howard isn't telling the true story of the Essex anyway. The screenplay (by Charles Leavitt) takes so many liberties with the actual events and characters described by Philbrick that you can't help but wonder why the film-makers didn't just simplify matters by going back to Moby-Dick in the first place.

There is a lot of narrative scaffolding here. As the movie begins, Herman Melville (played by Ben Whishaw) is shown trying to prise information about the Essex from its last surviving crew member. It is 1850, and 30 years have passed since the fateful encounter with the whale. Grizzled old inn-keeper Thomas Nickerson (Brendan Gleeson) is loathe to reminisce about what he saw when he was a young cabin boy aboard the doomed ship.

Melville offers him money, which he and his wife need. And so, over one long, dark night, Nickerson agrees to unburden himself. That prompts the flashbacks to 1820. It's a cumbersome framing device, presumably intended to induce some of the same foreboding as The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.

The casting seems a little off-beam. Chris Hemsworth (Thor in the Marvel movies and the womanising Formula 1 star James Hunt in Howard's recent film Rush) is a likeable, good-looking male lead but he is no sea-dog. The character he plays, First Mate Owen Chase, is a veteran mariner who knows his way around the oceans but here, even in the most extreme moments, stranded on a desert island or half scorched to death on an open raft, he looks more like a beach bum on a gap year than a Quaker sailor close to despair.

Chase has been promised command of a ship by the owners. The only reason he is denied captaincy of the Essex is that he is not from one of the blue-blood whaling families. Instead, he has to serve under the well-connected but very callow George Pollard (Benjamin Walker). Pollard is the Captain Bligh to Chase's Fletcher Christian but even the film's treatment of their fraught relationship is on the tentative side.

In the Heart of the Sea is very prettily shot but lacks any real sense of darkness or impending doom. The film is dealing with starvation, cannibalism, insanity and death, and yet it still has the look of a picturesque travelogue in which we are seeing a painted ship upon a painted ocean. In John Huston's version of Moby-Dick, before the sailors embarked on their voyage, they were treated to a hellfire and damnation sermon by a very gloomy preacher (played by Orson Welles). There is no such figure to set the scene here. Nor is there the feeling that this is a voyage of the damned. Chase and Pollard both want to collect as much whale oil as possible in as short a time as possible. The former wants to rush home to his wife, the latter to prove that he can cut it as a captain.

One of the most intriguing aspects of the film is its documentary-like approach to the business of whaling. In one scene, when the sailors have successfully caught a whale, Nickerson (played as a teenager by Tom Holland) is forced to climb inside the creature, lowering himself through its spout into its stinking innards in order to scrape out a few extra buckets of oil. We are always made aware of the economics of whaling. This is a very lucrative trade and no one even begins to question the suffering inflicted on the whales.

There is something comical about the haste with which Chase, Pollard and company decide to chase after the white whale after hearing a description of the havoc it has wrought from a Spanish captain who has lost his arm and most of his crew. "As I live and breathe, he's mine," Chase yells when he finally has the chance to harpoon the whale – but he utters the line without a huge amount of conviction.

The whale itself looks impressive. It's a huge creature with a barnacled white back and a knack of performing devastating back flips, in which it uses its tail to rip asunder boats and knock down masts. Even so, the footage of this great leviathan in action plays more like something out of a natural history documentary than a horror film. It is not some phantom creature wreaking vengeance against the whale hunters but just an unusually large sperm whale, protecting itself and its young from these marauding hunters.

Howard is known for making thoughtful action pictures which always pay attention to character as well as to spectacle. In the Heart of the Sea is as meticulously crafted as all his films. It's just a little on the torpid side – a story about obsession and madness that ends up being told in far too pallid a fashion.