My first thought when I saw this was, “ooh, cool.” About 34 milliseconds later I thought, “what the actual fuck?”

There are things in the image that can’t be real. Like, the sea state looks really nasty, like it’s blowing at least 40 or 50 knots. But the ship’s sails appear to have much less wind in them; I’d say 10 to 15 knots, tops. And the ship has every possible sail set, which doesn’t make sense with a wind strength that could produce a sea like that.

The ship is right next to the shore (and is actually sailing in the direction of that shore). Who would take their ship into such a position? And under full sail? It doesn’t make sense.

Also, there’s no one visible on the ship. Not a single human figure visible anywhere. That’s when I realized, oh; it must be a model. A really frickin’ amazing model. It’s probably a miniature (but a really big one, like the “bigatures” they made for the LOTR movies). Because the detail is kind of incredible.

And that sea state: Again, kind of incredible. I’m obsessive about sailing movies (who’d have thought?) and getting a sea surface that looks that good, in the sense of realistically conveying the appearance of a storm, is really rare. Whoever did that (the sails/sea state mismatch notwithstanding) was a total badass.

So then I turned to Google image search, and pretty quickly found what I was looking for. This appears to be from the 2006 German movie Der Untergang der Pamir. It tells the story of the Pamir, the last commercial sailing ship to round Cape Horn. In September of 1957 she sank in the Azores after being caught in Hurricane Carrie.

I don’t know if this is a production still taken during filming or an actual shot from the movie. Either way, it’s impressive.

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