The Perfect Storm

The Perfect Storm is a great example of Hollywood taking a true event that needs no embellishment or standard schmaltz to make it engaging, adding the embellishment or schmaltz anyway, and ending up with a weaker product for it.

The storm of 1991 grabbed the attention of the nation for a reason. I watched all the reports of the storm from hundreds of miles away, spellbound and horrified.

This film, which purports to put us in the center of the storm, fails to do the same. The problem is that we’ve been lulled into “it’s a typical Hollywood movie” coma by the ridiculous speeches put into the mouths of all the actors, particularly George Clooney, who is forced to act as though being the captain of a small commercial fishing vessel isn’t work, but a higher calling akin to being a priest or a brain surgeon or a kindergarten teacher. Every character gets their moment in the sun so that we’ll feel their loss when it happens, and as a result, the movie takes FOREVER before we get anywhere.

Ironically, the storm is somewhat skimped on: There’s a brief scene which utterly fails to explain what the storm is, how it occurred and why it’s noteworthy. Instead, we get every possible disaster at sea aboard the Andrea Gail first. Of course, since no one from the ship participated in the filming of this movie — for obvious reasons — the fact that the whole sequence has been made up out of whole cloth makes it even less engaging.

And for all the talk of how much money was involved in creating the special effects, it all looks remarkably like a Hollywood invention, not a real ship at sea — unless ships at sea are now lit like Hollywood sound stages.

The poor actors trapped in this film do excellent work with the too-standard material, and make the film more watchable than it ought to be. But ultimately, I found myself wanting to watch Jaws again, or re-read The Old Man and the Sea, the two stories the filmmakers desperately aped and swiped from, coming up with a product that measures up to neither.

This is a renter.

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