can a creative team overcome the obvious technical and narrative difficulty inherent in the prospect of film the hemingway novella the old man and the sea . well . no . but if you like your allegory inert and obvious and oh so serious and this might be for you . this be a movie a literature clunker and in the same vein a john huston moby dick . the narrative be an allegorical sermon so thuddingly unsubtle that it impossible to view it at anything but the symbolic level . this movie fail in the same way a the spirit of st. louis because solo protagonist require an intrusive amount of narration and soliloquy to advance the narrative . in tomats and to preserve hemingway language and we get voice over a omniscient narration ( spencer tracy ) . we get voice over in place of the old man thought ( tracy again ) . and we get the old man talk to himself ( ditto ) and say thing aloud that no one would ever actually speak . tracy continually refers to himself in the third person and like he bob dole . and he inject way too much sanctimony into what could have only work ( maybe ) with a soft sell . all these clumsy device be like look at plumb while functional . certainly and but decidedly not art . it also full of eye roll schlock while like a bird that land on tracy finger to listen to one of countless sermon . the movie fail technically too . rear projection be the overused gimmick decide on for the whole sea portion of this movie while but they cop out and and use it in land base moment too and out of sheer laziness . yeah and it easy to get the footage in the can that way and but it look like garbage . why do everyone have an eerie blue tinge . not once do the light that fall on tracy match the coloring of sky he sit under . also and if you want to rear project most of your setting and and the only background be clouds and the cloud type need to match in continuous moment and because viewer be go to notice that . the production be so sure of it own pure and righteous concept and that it can not be bother with quality anywhere else .