The Modern Ocean

by Shane Carruth

The competition for valuable shipping routes, the search for the hidden cache of priceless material, and the powerful need for vengeance will converge in a spectacular battle on the rolling decks of behemoth cargo ships.

180 pages, Unknown Binding

Published June 16, 2020

Reviews

[Kern · Rating 4 out of 5]

Like his two films, this is extremely dense and challenging. On top of the invented terms and concepts, many sequences cut back and forward through time and character motivations are almost exclusively unclear. I'd be lying if I said I could parse most of what was going on, or that I could provide even a semi-accurate summary of the plot. But that's what you get with Carruth, and I love getting lost in his labyrinths. His ambition is off the charts, and even when his work is maddeningly opaque, borderline inscrutable, I still get a genuine thrill out of trying (and mostly failing) to keep up.

[Kurt · Rating 5 out of 5]

A masterpiece: fast-moving, human, complicated, esoteric and fascinating (plus shootouts and explosions). Brilliant. Like PRIMER, you’ll want to view/read it a few times to parse it all out. Completely sui generis: in its own category.

[Ashton Alexander Webb · Rating 2 out of 5]

A frustrating read & not very exciting as a result. It is not friendly to the reader; a bit demanding(unfortunately I neither own an exchange, have never crewed a modern ship nor worked for a shipping company). What is going on? I don't have the time to stop every second to decipher it. It just doesn't help to get through it when it's so fraught with jargon that I can't even interpret with a Google search. I still don't know what the hell an ISO or an arbite is. And things don't get any easier when the timeline is jumping all over the place. As a whole it reads very Nolan-esque, but not in a good way. Maybe it's just me. Clearly it all makes sense to the writer, but I feel he's alienated many a reader in the process of writing such an uninteresting story befuddled with terms that have no meaning to me all while losing me along the way time-wise. Maybe it requires multiple readings to really appreciate or understand it in any way, but at one-hundred & eighty pages...once is enough, thank you. I give it two stars because I'm sure Shane Carruth put a lot of work into it & I want to respect that at the very least.

[Ajay · Rating 5 out of 5]

Just finished reading a Modern Ocean (mild spoilers)

I just finished reading the script, and honestly, it’s exactly what you’d expect from Shane Carruth

It hops from Japanese oceanographic vessels to seafloor mining off Iceland, then over to warehouse chaos in Brooklyn, fancy suits in Mumbai, maritime exchanges in Algeria. Carruth weaves together rival shipping families, secret salvage ops, warehouse sabotage, and financial maneuvering with the same obsessive detail he used in his last two films

It’s meticulous and completely unwilling to dumb things down. And honestly I think that’s why this thing never got made. As brilliant as it is, it’s just *so* dense and you’d need a massive budget to shoot in all these global ports and underwater rigs and good luck getting a studio to back a movie where half the scenes are people arguing over core samples or maritime salvage law.

Even though I'm glad that I read it and can't wait to read A Topiary next, although I'm going to wait and let this story sit with me for a while