Decided to treat myself to lunch and a movie today, went to see 'In the Heart of the Sea'. It was a movie I'd been looking forward to, but I didn't think it was something any of my friends would have enjoyed as much.

It was enjoyable, did a decent job covering the wild fun (sarcasm) of life on a Yankee whaling ship. It also pulled no punches about how gory things got. It added some drama bits, including the subplot of the captain and first mate being at odds (in actuality they'd served together on the Essex before hand). However, the bit about non-Nantucketers being treated as second class sailors was true. New Englanders were/are a clannish lot, and Nantucket took that to an extreme. There's some other liberties with the later parts of the movie, but that's not unexpected. The movie itself hangs together well, I knew the story (and read the book the movie is based on long ago), but nothing stood out as overly implausable. 4 out of 5 hoisted sails.

(and if you're curious, the ship in the movie was a brig, two masts and ship rigged. The ship in real life was a 3 masted ship, at least that's what all the pictures I've found say.)