The Perfect Storm

Review Certified (C) Spoiler free.

The Perfect Storm is a film about how a bunch of rootin’ tootin’ commercial Marlin fishermen drive their boat out into the Atlantic Ocean to catch some fish and get caught in a really, really big storm. There are big waves. Rain falls on them. The boat goes up and down a lot, but they don’t throw up.

Every so often, someone falls off the boat and someone else heroically jumps into the ocean and pulls them out. Bits of the boat fall off and everyone worries, until one of them fixes it. The storm gets really bad and the boat goes up and down a REAL lot and ...

nope. I won’t spoil it.

Perhaps I’m being bitchy. The Perfect Storm is not really a film in the normal sense of the word at all. Like any big blockbuster, it is an amalgam of special effects and loud noises mixed with a few cardboard characters designed to appeal to the largest possible audience without offending anyone. When judged as such, Perfect Storm succeeds admirably.

The storm is nothing short of magnificent; the boats are, with the exception of a couple of dodgy CGI inserts, more than adequate. The plot is suitably non existent and the characters could never offend anyone who remained awake enough to watch them. If you think of a Mega-Value McStuff-Yourself McStupid-McMeal MegaDeal and then translate that concept into "A film about a big storm with boats" you won’t be far off the mark.

After the film finishes you feel stuffed stupid and sensorially overloaded.

A hour later you remember the special effect you liked the most.

An hour after that you abandon an abortive discussion about plot holes to play with the cat.

You wake up the next morning and can’t remember much about it at all.

All this is not to say that there aren’t good bits hiding like pieces of pickle in this film, but they are swamped by way too much sauce and sugary bun. The director, Wolfgang Peterson, obviously loves the sea & ships and frequently uses the vast resources at his disposal to deliver the greatest, most mind numbing ocean storm vistas ever filmed. It would be a perfect world if these effects could somehow have been sandwiched into the middle of Wolfgang Peterson’s best film "Das Boot", but the world being what it is, we will have to live with that film having a perfect story and unimpeachable characters set against sometimes dodgy special effects - and this one, which manages to be pretty much the exact reverse.

The actors? Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio does her best with the material available but ultimately makes you wish that she had been cast as the centre piece of a different film where she had more lines and no co-stars. George Clooney delivers a standardly brilliant performance where he surveys the special effects with a succession of expressions ranging from "number fours" (thin lipped calm) to "number threes" (Roger Moore asleep.) I imagine that only lavatory attendants will ever see the true impact of his "number two" expression and his "Number one" is reserved for when someone who has the good taste to actually set fire to him.

Suffice to say that this film further cements his reputation as a masturbation fantasy for people who feel threatened by the post coital conversation of candles.

There are some really good bits in this film. There is one of the best shipwrecks ever filmed. There are immense magnificent vistas. There is the wonder and the power of the sea, so easily forgotten by a world that commutes by airliner. And then, sadly, there is the script, and against this script, the Atlantic Ocean itself struggles in vain.

Rating? 4 outa five.

(C)opyright Alex Rieneck, 2000.