Leviathan (2034)
Leviathan is a 2034 American dark fantasy adventure film loosely based on Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick and reimagined through the mythological architecture of Mastodon’s 2004 album of the same name. Directed in an A24-coded style that combines maritime horror, psychedelic epic, apocalyptic folklore, and character-driven psychological drama, the film stars Robert Pattinson as Captain Ahab, a ruined whaling commander whose pursuit of the white whale becomes entangled with a larger metaphysical quest. Rather than adapting the whale as a single animal antagonist, the film treats it as a living threshold: an ancient, wounded, godlike creature whose movements reveal the path to a hidden tower at the edge of the world, a place said to hold the origin point of sea, storm, death, memory, and human obsession.
The film’s ensemble is built around a decaying nineteenth-century whaling vessel, the Pequod, reimagined not as a straightforward ship of industry but as a half-sacred, half-condemned expeditionary craft crewed by people who believe they are chasing profit, revenge, salvation, or revelation, depending on how much of the truth they have been told. Robert Pattinson’s Ahab is gaunt, feverish, magnetic, and physically deteriorating, with an ivory prosthetic leg that seems less like an injury marker than a ritual instrument. His obsession with the whale is not simply vengeance for mutilation; he believes the creature has infected his blood, altered his mind, and marked him as the only human capable of following it to the tower. The closer he comes to the whale, the less he behaves like a man pursuing an animal and the more he resembles a prophet trying to complete a murder-suicide against God.
Ishmael is recast as a young former schoolteacher and amateur naturalist who boards the Pequod after a private collapse, seeking anonymity at sea but slowly becoming the only surviving witness capable of assembling the voyage’s meaning. Queequeg is not treated as exotic ornament or sidekick, but as a harpooner, spiritual counterweight, and protector whose cosmology recognizes the ocean as an animate intelligence long before the others do. Starbuck is the moral and operational spine of the ship, a first mate who understands that Ahab’s language of destiny is becoming a weapon against the crew. Stubb and Flask represent older maritime fatalism and working-class survival, men accustomed to brutality but increasingly unsettled by the metaphysical quality of the hunt. Pip, reimagined as a teenage cabin hand and musician, becomes the first member of the crew to hear the whale’s underwater song clearly; his later madness is presented less as breakdown than as unwanted translation.
The film also introduces several original characters to extend the album’s mythic world beyond Melville’s immediate frame. Dr. Elian Voss, a disgraced astronomer and surgeon, joins the voyage after charting a rare planetary alignment that he believes corresponds to old whaling disappearances and deep-sea magnetic disturbances. Mara Grieve, a widow and former missionary cartographer, travels aboard under false credentials after discovering a map that shows an impossible tower rising from a volcanic island surrounded by spiral currents. Father Rúan, a defrocked priest obsessed with Nephilim, flood myths, and angelic corruption, sees the whale as a judgment-beast rather than an animal. The Fiji Mermaid, no longer merely a fraudulent sideshow object, becomes a hideous preserved relic aboard the ship that gradually reanimates as the voyage crosses into stranger waters. Fedallah appears as Ahab’s private diviner, a silent, ash-covered figure who seems to have already drowned once and who speaks only when the ship enters regions where time behaves incorrectly.
The film opens with a black screen and the sound of water inside a human body. The first images are microscopic and oceanic at once: red blood cells moving like plankton, veins branching like coral, whale song vibrating through tissue, and a pale eye opening beneath black water. Ahab wakes in a room above a New Bedford tavern, convinced that something inside him is not his own. His stump bleeds through its bandage despite having healed years earlier. He hears the whale before anyone speaks of it. Outside, the town is alive with the ordinary machinery of whaling commerce: barrels, rope, oil, ledgers, tavern songs, dockside sermons, and men preparing to make violence appear respectable by giving it an industry.
Ishmael arrives in New Bedford during a storm, carrying little more than a notebook, a change of clothes, and an exhausted desire not to be known. He enters the Spouter-Inn, where the walls are covered not only with paintings of ships and whales but with strange diagrams of ancient sea routes, volcanic islands, spiral symbols, and one repeated image: a tower rising from a mound of hands beneath a burning sky. He meets Queequeg in the famous shared-room sequence, but the scene is staged with solemn warmth rather than comic fear. Queequeg recognizes one of Ishmael’s sketches as a sign of “the old road below the water,” and the two form an immediate bond based not merely on survival but on mutual exile.
The first act establishes the Pequod as a vessel already under sentence. Before departure, several sailors notice that the ship’s ironwork sweats rust-red water, though no rain has fallen. Pip hears rhythmic tapping from inside sealed oil barrels. Starbuck discovers that Ahab has altered the voyage charts, removing ordinary whale grounds and replacing them with a series of impossible coordinates. Voss studies the night sky and realizes the voyage has been timed to a rare alignment he has been tracking for thirteen years, one connected in his own research to a red planetary return and historical accounts of ships vanishing near volcanic islands. Ahab refuses to explain this, but he privately visits the ship’s hold, where the preserved Fiji Mermaid hangs in a glass case beside old harpoons, bone charms, and an ivory plate carved with the same tower seen in the inn.
As the Pequod leaves harbor, the film remains grounded in the harsh physical detail of whaling life. The crew work through cold rain, cramped quarters, food rot, blistered hands, and the constant damp misery of the open sea. Yet almost immediately, the natural world seems to answer Ahab’s presence. Sharks follow the ship in unnatural formation. Birds strike the masts at dawn and fall dead on the deck. The sea glows faintly beneath the hull at night. Ahab speaks to no one for days, then finally emerges and nails a strange gold coin to the mast, not as a reward for the first man who sights the whale, but as payment for the first man willing to see it without lying to himself. He tells the crew the white whale is not simply prey but a gate, a holy grail moving beneath the skin of the world. Some men laugh. Some cheer. Starbuck watches with dread as Ahab turns a commercial voyage into a crusade.
The first major hunt, corresponding to the energy of “Blood & Thunder,” is staged as a violent initiation. The crew sight a sperm whale through storm-mist, but as the boats close in, Ahab insists it is only a herald, not the true whale. The kill becomes chaotic. One harpooner is dragged under and resurfaces with his eyes burned white. Blood blooms across the water, but the sea seems to pull it into a spiral rather than disperse it. Ishmael witnesses Ahab standing in his boat, staring not at the dying whale but beyond it, toward something only he can see. That night, the dead whale’s opened body reveals a stone object embedded in its tissue: a small black spiral, smooth as volcanic glass. Voss identifies it as impossible. Queequeg refuses to touch it. Ahab places it in his cabin beside his maps.
The second movement of Act I deepens Ahab’s self-identification with the monster. He begins speaking as if the whale’s will and his own have braided together. In private, he tells Ishmael that the creature once looked into him and left behind a command. He no longer believes he governs his soul. His body, especially the ivory leg, becomes a kind of compass. When the ship turns away from the correct course, the leg aches and cracks; when it follows the whale’s path, the pain subsides. Pattinson’s Ahab is therefore not merely mad in the theatrical sense. He is lucid enough to be persuasive and damaged enough to be terrifying. He knows he is being used, but he would rather be used by cosmic purpose than live as a mutilated man in an ordinary world.
Act I ends at Ísland, a volcanic island that should not be on their route and appears first as heat shimmer in freezing fog. The island sequence adapts the album’s Icelandic mythic imagery into a place where land is newly born and still arguing with the sea. The crew anchor near black beaches, geysers, blue lagoons, and lava fields under an enormous moon. Mara Grieve reveals that her hidden map begins here. Its tower-symbol is not an invention but one of several markers associated with old Norse, pagan, and pre-Christian sea cosmologies. Father Rúan interprets the island as a remnant of the world before the flood, a place where gods, giants, and drowned angels left structural marks in the earth. Ahab believes the whale has brought them here because the path to the tower cannot be found by sailing alone. It must be earned through ordeal.
On the island, the film shifts into hallucinatory myth. The crew find carved stones depicting a ram-headed guide, a spear associated with Odin, a hammer-like storm symbol, and a woman formed of lava and ice. Pip hears music rising from a geothermal pool and follows it into a cave, where he sees the white whale swimming through air inside the rock. Queequeg saves him, but not before Pip begins repeating coordinates that correspond to no known chart. Ahab takes this as confirmation that the whale is moving through multiple layers of reality: ocean, dream, blood, volcano, sky. Starbuck tries to organize a return to the ship, but a sudden eruption forces the crew to flee. As lava pours into the sea, the water boils and a vast pale shape passes beneath the surface offshore, watching them with one enormous eye. The men realize they have not found the whale. The whale has found them.
Act II begins with the Pequod leaving Ísland and entering waters that appear increasingly disconnected from ordinary geography. The sky brightens and darkens without relation to time. The compass rotates slowly even when the ship is still. The crew encounter abandoned vessels from different eras: a Dutch merchant ship with no crew and fresh candles burning below deck, a twentieth-century research buoy crusted with barnacles despite belonging to a future that has not happened, and a primitive raft covered in handprints and whale teeth. Voss theorizes that they are sailing through a current where time collects around the whale’s path. Ahab is exhilarated. Starbuck is horrified. Ishmael continues recording everything, but his journal entries begin to appear written before he remembers composing them.
The “Seabeast” section introduces the idea that the whale is not the only creature pulling the ship east. A massive unseen force drags the Pequod across miles of gray water while the crew fight to keep control. Queequeg dreams of drowning men whose lungs are filled with flowers and ash. The ship passes over a drowned temple where statues of maimed figures hold offerings toward the surface. Mara believes the temple marks a healing place corrupted by previous hunts, where sailors once tried to bargain with the sea by offering teeth, limbs, and children. Ahab sees the temple as proof that all cultures eventually discovered the whale’s route and failed to complete it. He becomes more openly messianic, promising that the tower will cure mutilation, restore lost souls, and reveal why suffering exists. Starbuck says no tower can justify what he is doing to the crew.
The Iron Tusk sequence is the film’s first full descent into marine warfare. The Pequod encounters a colossal sperm whale, not the white whale but one of its brutal descendants, a battle-scarred bull with broken harpoons rusted into its flanks. Ahab orders an attack, claiming the creature carries the scent of the holy whale. The hunt is staged as a grim industrial nightmare: oars crack, ropes burn through hands, lungs burst from effort, and the whale’s black blood spills across the sea like oil. During the assault, Stubb is nearly killed and one of the younger sailors is crushed between boat and body. The kill brings no victory. Inside the whale, they find not ambergris but a mass of human-made debris from multiple centuries: carved ivory, coins, glass eyes, devotional medals, broken sextants, and a child’s shoe. Ishmael realizes the sea has been storing the evidence of human appetite inside the animals humans butcher.
The voyage then enters the Megalodon passage, where myth and fraud become indistinguishable. The Fiji Mermaid in the hold begins to move, its stitched animal-human form twitching in its case whenever blood is spilled. Fedallah finally speaks, warning that false monsters attract real ones by teaching men to look badly. That night, the crew are attacked by a prehistoric shark-like presence, not clearly seen at first, only indicated by teeth striking the hull from below and enormous pressure waves moving in moonlight. The creature is eventually revealed as a spectral megalodon, a relic predator drawn by the whale’s route and the crew’s fear. It does not simply attack; it tests the ship’s place in the food chain. Several sailors are lost. Ahab watches the carnage with grim fascination, saying that the ocean is reminding them that human dominion is only a story told on land.
The Megalodon sequence also reveals one of the film’s central symbolic ideas: every creature encountered on the voyage represents a distorted form of human desire. The sperm whale represents conquest, the megalodon appetite, the Fiji Mermaid deception, the hydra vengeance, and the white whale transcendence corrupted into obsession. Ishmael begins to understand that the tower may not be a place of revelation but a lens that magnifies whatever motive brings someone to it. Queequeg, sensing this, urges Ishmael to survive even if the rest are taken. He says a witness is sometimes the only thing that prevents catastrophe from becoming religion.
The middle of Act II turns inward with the Naked Burn sequence. The Pequod sails into a windless zone where the sun hangs too close and the ocean reflects the sky like polished metal. The crew suffer burns despite the lack of flame. Father Rúan interprets the heat as angelic punishment and begins preaching about Nephilim, giants born from forbidden unions, and the burning of corrupt sanctuaries from within. That night, several sailors see enormous humanoid shadows walking through a forest that appears on the horizon though no land is present. The ship’s chapel catches fire without ignition. Altars, icons, and personal tokens burn from the inside out. The scene functions as a spiritual purge: every inherited belief system aboard the ship is tested and found insufficient. Religion, science, commerce, and revenge all fail to explain the world they have entered.
Ahab responds to this failure by becoming more absolute. He tells the crew that the old categories were always lies and that the whale is the only honest thing left because it does not pretend to love mankind. Starbuck attempts a mutiny, arguing that Ahab has mistaken infection for calling and that the voyage has become murder. Several crew members side with him, but before they can act, Pip begins singing in the voice of the whale. The sound incapacitates the men and opens a vision across the deck: the white whale swimming beneath a tower built of hands, the tower opening like an eye, and a path of dead stars leading toward it. The mutiny collapses. Some men return to Ahab out of fear, others because they have now seen too much to go back.
Aqua Dementia marks the film’s descent into collective madness. The Pequod enters boiling water under a sun that appears to have fallen closer to the earth. The sea is littered with black stones forming a path that seems to continue beneath the waves. Voss believes they are sailing over the spine of a submerged volcanic range. Mara believes the stones are the remains of previous ships turned into markers. Father Rúan declares that God is watching the world burn and doing nothing because judgment has already passed. Beneath the surface, hydra-like shapes coil through steam vents. Men begin seeing alternate versions of themselves walking on the water, each one representing a life not taken. One sailor leaps overboard to follow his double and is boiled alive. Another tries to drink seawater and coughs up ash.
During this sequence, Ahab and Ishmael finally confront each other. Ishmael accuses Ahab of dragging everyone toward death to avoid admitting that his wound is meaningless. Ahab responds that meaning is not found; it is made by force against the universe. He says the whale took his leg but gave him direction, and that direction is more valuable than wholeness. Ishmael recognizes the horror of this: Ahab would rather be completed by hatred than remain incomplete in freedom. Queequeg privately tells Ishmael that Ahab has already given himself to the whale, but the whale has not yet decided whether to accept him.
Act II climaxes with the discovery of the tower’s first true sign. After the boiling sea calms, the Pequod enters a vast circular current filled with floating bones, dead coral, and fragments of ships. At the centre of the current, the white whale surfaces fully for the first time. It is enormous, scarred, luminous, and terrifyingly calm. Its head bears a crooked wound where countless harpoons have failed to hold. Its eye reflects not the ship but each viewer’s deepest motive. Ahab sees a throne. Starbuck sees a grave. Ishmael sees an empty page. Queequeg sees a door that should remain closed. Pip sees home. The whale exhales, and in the mist above its blow appears the tower, impossibly distant yet directly ahead. The crew understand that killing the whale is not the way to find the tower. The whale must be wounded, followed, and survived.
The final act begins with Hearts Alive, the longest and most overwhelming movement of the film. The Pequod follows the white whale into a region where the ocean opens downward like a wound. The ship is pulled into a descending spiral current, passing through layers of water that resemble geological strata, memory, and afterlife. Time and space become lonely, elastic, and hostile. The hull groans under pressure. The hold fills with black water. Men pray, curse, sing, and confess. Pip, now fully attuned to the whale’s song, says they are entering “the caverns of the deep,” where the whale carries every harpoon ever thrown at it and every soul lost in its pursuit.
The underwater descent is staged as both catastrophe and revelation. The Pequod should be destroyed, but the whale’s movement creates an airless corridor in which the ship continues downward, sailing through the deep as if through night sky. Around them are impossible sights drawn from Romano’s visual language: blue deities beneath the waves, black mountains inverted below the surface, golden temple forms, pale whales moving like planets, and drowned figures holding their hearts like lanterns. The crew see the tower again, not above an island now but rising from the ocean floor, built from hands, bones, coral, and carved stone. At its summit burns a white sun. Ahab believes this is the place where the whale’s god lives. Ishmael begins to suspect the tower is made from all who followed obsession to its endpoint.
The final pursuit begins when Ahab orders the boats lowered inside the descending current. Starbuck refuses, and Ahab nearly kills him before Queequeg intervenes. Rather than staging a simple fight for command, the film presents the crew as spiritually divided. Some men still want the whale dead. Some want the tower. Some want only to surface. Some no longer know the difference. Ahab takes the lead boat with Fedallah and several loyalists. Ishmael, Queequeg, Starbuck, and Pip follow in another, attempting to prevent the final strike. Mara remains aboard the Pequod to hold the ship steady, while Voss records the alignment above, realizing that the descent and the planetary event have synchronized exactly. The red planet, the whale, and the tower are in line.
Ahab reaches the whale first. The creature does not flee. It turns and looks directly at him, as if recognizing something it has long expected. Ahab hurls his harpoon toward the crooked brow, and for a moment the weapon hangs in the water between them like a question. It strikes. The whale bleeds light, not blood. The tower answers by opening its summit. Across the sea-floor, every dead sailor embedded in the structure seems to inhale. Ahab laughs, weeps, and orders the crew to tow him closer, but the line coils around his ivory leg. Fedallah is dragged into the water and vanishes beneath the whale’s body, fulfilling his own prophecy without ever having clearly stated it. Ahab refuses to cut the rope.
The white whale then rises, dragging Ahab and the boats upward through the spiral. The Pequod is caught in the same motion. The ascent becomes a reverse drowning, a catastrophic birth toward the surface. Flame appears in the whale’s mouth, smoke in its breath, and the ocean boils around its body. The ship’s iron sides buckle. The whale breaches in a vast storm, and for one moment the tower is visible above the waves, not distant now but towering over the horizon like a judgment. Ahab sees it and understands too late that it was never offering him mastery. It was offering him completion through erasure.
The climax adapts the final destruction of the Pequod as a ritual unmaking. Ahab, lashed to his own line, is pulled against the whale’s body and dragged into the sea. He does not scream. His final expression is neither victory nor regret, but recognition. The whale dives, and the tower collapses from sight. The Pequod breaks apart under the force of the current. Starbuck is swept away while trying to free trapped sailors. Mara disappears beneath falling rigging after releasing the map into the water. Voss’s astronomical instruments ignite. Father Rúan, seeing the tower vanish, realizes that his theology has mistaken scale for God, and he is taken by the sea mid-prayer. Pip’s song stops.
Ishmael survives because Queequeg saves him. In a final, quiet inversion of the spectacle around them, Queequeg gives Ishmael his own coffin, previously built during an illness at sea and converted into a buoy. Queequeg does not frame the act as sacrifice but as continuity. Someone must carry the memory back. Ishmael clings to the coffin as the wreckage disappears. Beneath him, he sees the white whale pass one final time through the dark water, no longer pursuing or pursued. Its eye meets his, and he understands that the whale was never a monster in the human sense. It was a force that revealed what men brought to it.
The film’s final movement is wordless for several minutes. Ishmael floats alone in the aftermath. The sea is calm. Wreckage drifts around him: wood, rope, oil, pages from his journal, a broken harpoon, the Fiji Mermaid’s empty glass case, and Ahab’s ivory leg, now cracked and filling with water. The Rachel, a distant ship searching for its own lost crew, eventually finds him. When asked what happened, Ishmael cannot answer immediately. He looks toward the horizon, where the sunrise briefly forms the outline of a tower before dissolving into ordinary light.
In the epilogue, Ishmael returns to land but not to innocence. He attempts to write the account in a boarding room, surrounded by maritime charts and fragments salvaged from the wreck. The narrative we have watched is implied to be his reconstruction, though he knows language cannot fully hold what the sea revealed. He writes that Ahab was not wrong to believe the whale meant something; he was wrong to believe it meant him. Queequeg’s coffin sits in the corner, dried and salt-stained, now both relic and witness. Ishmael closes his journal and hears, very faintly, whale song under the floorboards.
The final image returns to the ocean. Far from land, the white whale surfaces beneath a night sky filled with unfamiliar stars. In the distance, the tower rises again, smaller now, or perhaps farther away, surrounded by storm cloud and gold light. Beneath the water, in the blue-black deep, countless hearts glow briefly and then go dark. The whale dives. The sea closes. The screen cuts to black over the first soft notes of “Joseph Merrick,” used not as triumph but as elegy.
Structurally, the film is divided into three acts that correspond to increasing levels of immersion. Act I is the call and departure: New Bedford, the formation of the crew, the first hunt, the revelation that Ahab’s pursuit is not ordinary revenge, and the volcanic Ísland threshold where the voyage leaves known geography. Act II is the ordeal and corruption: the ship passes through monstrous sea-zones shaped by appetite, deception, religion, violence, and collective madness, while the whale’s connection to the tower becomes clear. Act III is the descent and annihilation: the crew enter the deep, discover that the tower is built from obsession itself, and are destroyed when Ahab attempts to force revelation into submission.
The film’s meaning rests on the difference between pursuit and witness. Ahab believes meaning must be seized, wounded, and dragged into view. Ishmael learns that meaning may only be survived and carried back imperfectly. The whale is therefore not merely an enemy, and the tower is not merely a destination. They are structures of confrontation. Every character sees in them a different answer because the ocean does not speak in human categories. It magnifies hunger, grief, faith, violence, and awe until each becomes indistinguishable from destiny.
As an A24-coded reinterpretation of Leviathan, the film would not treat Mastodon’s album as a soundtrack laid over Melville, but as a second scripture fused into the original novel’s bones. The track titles become movements of the voyage. The lyrics become environmental logic. Paul Romano’s art becomes the cosmology: the whale below, the tower above, the deities at the edges, the ornamental symmetry of doom, the sense that the ocean is not empty space but a designed and watching intelligence. It is Moby-Dick after heavy metal, after climate dread, after psychedelia, after grief, after the collapse of human exceptionalism.
At its centre remains a simple horror: a man sees the infinite and decides it owes him an explanation.