I’ll admit that I’ve not read Whalefall, but I am excited for the book-to-screen adaptation, which is hitting the 2026 movie schedule this weekend. The top-line description of the movie is that it is about a scuba diver who is swallowed whole by a sperm whale, lives, and finds himself fighting to escape the whale’s belly. A number of reviews have called out how ridiculous the story is, which, in and of itself, is a pretty silly take for a movie, but there is actually precedent, and I’m not talking about Jonah.
Critics Are Upset That The Plot Is Unrealistic
Now that the first reviews of the movie are out, some of them are relishing the moment to point out how “preposterous” the plot is. Page Six says in its scathing review:
Turning one’s brain off to the extent that this preposterous movie — a combo of ‘The Poseidon Adventure,’ ‘The Meg’ and weirdly ‘The Lion King’ — requires is next to impossible.
Again, I haven’t seen the movie, but it’s not like I go into a movie like this expecting realism. That’s as silly as getting upset that dinosaurs exist in the Jurassic Park franchise or that King Kong is 100 times bigger than an average ape. You know, sometimes you have to suspend reality for a movie, right?
This movie seems to be too much for some critics, like James Berardinelli, who writes on Reel View:
Sometimes a premise can be so outlandish that it provides an impediment to enjoying a movie. In such cases, it falls on the filmmakers to create sufficient immersion to achieve that ephemeral state often referred to as the 'willing suspension of disbelief.'
Is the movie realistic? Well, no, not really.\Simon Foster at Screen Space agrees:
There is ‘suspension of disbelief’ and then there is WHALEFALL.
He then goes into a few details about how it would be impossible for a man to survive being eaten by a whale. While I’m sure his science is sound, there are always exceptions. In fact, there is an example of a man surviving.
Michael Packard Survived Being Trapped In A Whale
I’m not a doctor or a biologist, but I don’t think anyone should go out there and try to recreate Whalefall, which is obviously terrifying, but there is an example of a man getting trapped inside a whale’s mouth and surviving. His name is Michael Packard, and he’s a lobster fisherman from Cape Cod. According to CNN, Packard was also scuba diving, hunting lobsters, and:
As he descended to the floor for another run, he was suddenly hit by what felt like a freight train. Water rushed around him and everything went dark. The shark finally got me, he thought, before realizing he couldn’t feel any sense of being bitten. Instead, he realized, he was being crushed.
Packard found himself stuck in a humpback whale’s mouth, being crushed by its powerful jaws. His life flashed before his eyes, but less than a minute later, the lobsterman found himself being spat out of the whale’s mouth at the surface. He had survived. Now, he wasn’t swallowed like the character in Whalefall (or Jonah in the bible), but he was trapped by a whale and lived.
The book and the movie are not based on Packard’s story, and obviously there is a big difference between getting swallowed and being trapped in a mouth, but there is a big difference between cloning a sheep and cloning a T-Rex, yet we all accept that could be done in the world of movies. This isn’t any different.
