The Perfect Storm

The Perfect Storm (2000) is about a fishing boat lost in the Atlantic in 1991. The Andrea Gail sails from Massachusetts for swordfish. The season goes badly and Captain Billy Tyne persuades his crew to go further out. On the way back three weather systems merge: a hurricane, a cold front and a low pressure area. The phrase meteorologists used at the time became the film's title. The boat did not come back. Six men were lost and no bodies were found. That is where the film's problem lies. Nobody knows what happened in its final hours; there were no witnesses and no radio record. So the last forty minutes are entirely invented. Sebastian Junger's book said so plainly; it is a documentary work and presents the final section as supposition. The film shows that supposition directly. That produced a lawsuit. In 2000 the families of Captain Billy Tyne and crewman Dale Murphy sued Warner Bros. Their objection: real people were depicted without permission and events that never happened were invented to make the captain look reckless. Their lawyer compared the character Clooney plays to a man so consumed with the catch that he lost sight of safety, and said it was untrue. The case ran for years and in 2005 the Florida Supreme Court decided for the producers. The wave sequences mix digital and practical work; footage shot in a water tank was combined with computer imagery. Wolfgang Petersen directed, his second film set on water after Das Boot. It runs 130 minutes. Good for: disaster films, drama at sea, and true events. Less good for: the ending is entirely invented and the film does not say so; the drowning scenes are hard.