When Warner Bros. Pictures quietly delayed In the Heart of the Sea from its scheduled March opening until two weeks before Christmas, you assumed they sensed they had a winner on their hands. This is, after all, the studio that lately specializes in getting eleventh-hour contenders like American Sniper and Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close to crash the Oscars' main categories without pundits seeing them coming. On paper at least, this looked like an awards player: a nice-sized epic period drama with a classic literary foundation and A Beautiful Mind double winner Ron Howard at the helm. But Heart isn't crashing any Oscar parties in anything more than technical categories and even those might not happen if the Academy wasn't so short-memoried.

Purportedly telling the true story that inspired Moby Dick, Heart is based on a 2000 nonfiction book by Nathaniel Philbrick. A frame story finds author Herman Melville (Ben Whishaw) tracking down the only survivor from a harrowing incident that occurred a few decades earlier. Barely a teenager at the time (Tom Holland, the new Spider-Man), Thomas Nickerson (Brendan Gleeson) is now a graybeard who is reluctant to detail the experience. Nickerson's wife (Michelle Fairley) gets him some whiskey and encourages him to reveal all to this writer.

Our principal story takes place in 1820 and finds expectant father Owen Chase (Chris Hemsworth) reluctantly accepting another first mate position. He's ready to be captain, but such opportunities are reserved for those with legacies, like George Pollard (Benjamin Walker), the inexperienced man under whom he'll serve. Owen is promised a chance to captain after this voyage and he even makes his benefactor put it in writing.

The mission takes these and other men from Nantucket deep within the Atlantic Ocean, where they are to hunt whales. One giant white whale, roughly 100 feet long, is not about to have his life ended by a quickly thrown harpoon. Their weapons no match for him, the whale capsizes the Essex. Those who survive are shipwrecked for months. They are extremely hungry, sunburned, blistered, and gradually losing their minds. They end up on a remote island of no sustainable resources and are driven to desperate measures when they take their ships out in hopes of finding a water rescue.

Howard has built a respectable resume as a director, but his films are only as good as the stories they tell. This one, written by Blood Diamond's Charles Leavitt, who shares story credit with Rise/Dawn of the Planet of the Apes and Jurassic World couple Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver, leaves a lot to be desired. It's hardly a whale of a tale: poorly-defined men are pushed to fight for their survival after an impossibly vast behemoth wreaks havoc on their ship. That part should at least be exciting and full of dynamic visuals, right? It is not. Howard has made exciting movies before, like Ransom and Backdraft, but he's not an action spectacle filmmaker. And he doesn't come up with a way to prevent us from quickly tiring of the sight of a giant CGI whale hitting into a ship and tossing the humans about. Full of shaky, seaside camera work, the IMAX 3D visuals are not the feast you want or expect, especially not from the third row, where I was seated.

The movie tries to ground these shipwreck survival bits, which are rendered routine for those who have seen Cast Away, All Is Lost, and Kon-Tiki, with a frame story that is far too closely modeled after Life of Pi. In that multiple Oscar-winning Ang Lee film, the frame story added value in the form of complexity and soulfulness. This one exists simply for the occasional change of scenery, but it produces chuckles with its on-the-nose soul-baring.

It's tough to see how the film is any better suited to the crowded and competitive holiday moviegoing season, given just one week's head start on the new Star Wars, than it was to spring. If anything, this time of year heightens expectations and forces critics and audiences to compare new releases to the genuinely rewarding year-end fare strategically timed to the award season. This movie's dramatic failings make it look like the crowd-pleasing Creed, the unlikely revival of an old Sylvester Stallone franchise, may be the most productive major studio's most likely ticket to the Best Picture and acting category races that have consistently featured its output.