The Perfect Storm

[3]

As soon as I finished the book I knew this was going to be a film and I knew it would suck. The Book is written in a very journalistic way and reads more like a magazine article than a novel. It is a great book. Junger goes into ocean mechanics, history, and fishery detail that is totally lost in the movie. For instance his anecdotal info is riveting as well. Take the time a rogue wave blasted out the bridge windows of the Queen Mary, that's 90 feet above the water line, and she came within a degree or two of capsizing. Or the time, in the 1850's when a fishing boat came across a note in a bottle with the last words of a crew that hadn't been heard from in a year. One of the more interesting twists in the book is Junger's description of how the people left behind have to willfully extract the men from their lives. It is just a mater of faith that the men are dead since no boat, or bodies were ever recovered. The film also plays fast and loose with the facts. First of all there was no distress signal sent from the Andrea Gail. The rescue helicopter that picked up the crew from the yacht was not enroute to the AG but to a japanese fisherman when it went down.

But despite all that the film just wasn't interesting. The characters were dehumanized. The filmmaker had a clean slate for dialogue since none of the men survived. Yet all he could do was bullshit lines that weren't memorable at all. There could have been much made of the fact that, aside from Tyne, all the other men didn't much like fishing. It was a dead end job that they wanted to get clear of as soon as they could. Bob Brown's character was accurate but his animosity toward Tyne is not. Most sword boats are only in port for afew days at a time anyway.