THE PERFECT STORM: Less Than Perfect, But Perfectly Acceptable

  It’s possible to be humbled by nature just by standing at a rocky coastline on a relatively calm day.  So imagine being in a small boat, 600 kilometres from the nearest land, in the middle of one of the worst Atlantic storms in history!  Humbled, awestruck, and scared-to-death would probably be how you’d feel. 
  We could say that The Perfect Storm is “based on a true story”.  And we’d be mostly right.  The problem with The Perfect Storm is that we’ll never know what actually took place on the Andrea Gail in her final hours.  Everything that took place on the boat after she left Gloucester, Massachussetts is pure conjecture.  However the goal of any producer, director or actor in a story such as this, is to make the viewer sit back and think “I wonder what REALLY happened out there”?  And in this case, they have greatly succeeded.   There is still controversy surrounding this film, and how events are scripted.  But as an outside observer who didn’t know the characters or the background beforehand, I found the movie to be a fair portrayal of what MIGHT have happened.  At the very end, when all hope is lost, it is very likely that the doomed men were all thinking of the most important things in their soon-to-be-over lives.  It would be terribly painful for those left behind to watch it, but somewhat comforting to have an affirmation that they were being thought of at the end.  While none of us know what it’s like to be swallowed up and die in the ocean, there are enough who have come close and lived, to know what the absolute fear is like.  It’s this fear that the movie seizes on, and it does very well to show how the men deal with it. 
  Gordon Lightfoot wrote a song about the Edmund Fitzgerald, a freighter that went down in Lake Superior in the 1970s.  One of the lines in the song goes like this:
“The Lake it is said, never gives up her dead, when the gales of November come early.”  You can substitute the word “ocean” for “lake” and the same holds true.  When the weather blows like it did around the Andrea Gail, everything is at the mercy of the great and powerful forces that nature can serve up.  This storm, which actually happened, was a convergence of three powerful weather systems that combined to make one huge storm.  It was a storm that might happen once every hundred years.  Weather and wave beacons in the Atlantic were measuring waves of up to 100 feet high near the place where the Andrea Gail went down.  Next time you’re near a tall building, count up ten floors.  That’s how high the waves were.  Now imagine the helpless feeling you have being so far from land, with waves that high. 
  Is the Perfect Storm perfect?  No.  But as a “man against a raging sea” film, it’s pretty darn good. 

8.5 out of 10