I Went To See a Movie About Whales And All I Got Was Brendan Fraser In A Fat Suit
By Cominic Dacchione
As far back as I can remember, I’ve always had an affinity for sea creatures. Fish, squids, octopi, whatever, man, you name it. So when I heard that Brendan Fraser was making his return to the big screen in a movie called The Whale, I couldn’t have been happier. Expecting a spiritual successor to Free Willy, I quickly pre-purchased tickets. I even camped outside the theater on opening night. When the day finally came, I proudly marched into the theater, primed to watch a gripping tear-jerker about one of the ocean’s largest creatures. The movie started and my heart sank. I had been deceived.
Where do I even begin? The movie is titled The Whale, but there are NO WHALES to be seen throughout this ENTIRE film. In fact, there’s no deep sea life at all. Not even a goldfish. What. The. Fuck. To make matters worse, the film references Herman Melville’s literary classic Moby Dick less than five minutes in, almost as if to mock me. Why remind me of something I would much rather be doing? I could be reading a book about the BIGGEST and COOLEST whale ever, instead I’m just watching this lame movie about some fat guy in his apartment.
The fat man in question doesn’t leave his apartment throughout the duration of the film either. For the ENTIRE. FILM. There are glimmers of hope in very short flashbacks where you see him in the ocean, but these moments are fleeting. They last seconds at a time, and it’s the closest this movie gets to anything sea-related. Shameful.
As if to mock me even further, this movie includes repeated appearances of a small bird, continually returning to the main character’s windowsill to eat some food he routinely leaves out for it. Are you kidding me? A BIRD???!!! You couldn’t get further from an aquatic creature if you tried.
When I express my opinion on this movie, people tell me one of two things: “But it was so emotional! I cried so hard!” or “Wait, you thought it was about an actual whale? You’re stupid.” To the first reply, I have this to say: You’re not alone. I cried too. I cried because I wasted two hours of my precious time watching a morbidly obese man eat himself to death when instead, I could have thrown on a documentary about nature’s biggest, most majestic creature: the blue whale. To the people calling me stupid, I’ll admit I’m not perfect. I may have made a mistake. But the blame does not fall on my shoulders, no, no. It falls on the shoulders of the corrupt Hollywood media executives who somehow took their attention away from their pedophile social club long enough to devise a plan to prey upon America’s most oppressed group: the marine life lover. What they did to bait us into wasting our time with this movie is unforgivable, and they’ll be receiving a handful of angry letters with my name on them. Maybe if they called this movie “Literally Nothing”, I wouldn’t have made the mistake of seeing it. At least it’d have a more accurate title.
To all my fellow whale-lovers out there, hope is not lost. There’s plenty of cinema out there just for us, from the aforementioned Free Willy, to 2015’s Blackfish. The unfortunate truth is that The Whale is not a movie for us. It’s a movie for maniacs and haters.