Review of The Perfect Storm (2000) by Paul W — 25 Apr 2013

"The Perfect Storm" is a dish with a lot of great ingredients--A list actors, great direction, fantastic big budget special effects, and a story from a best selling novel--that never quite comes together.

I think you can view most individual scenes from the movie and think, 'that was really good'. Somewhere along the way, though, the exercise in story telling goes awry. Personally, I think it's in the sense of doom that hangs over everything and everyone from the first scene to the last.

By the time that boat is struggling to climb that last wave at the end, there isn't really a sense of tragedy. It feels like the characters have already been dead for at least an hour, and they just didn't know it, yet.

I'm not sure how good you can make a movie based on the premise that everyone dies and the audience knows that going in. More humanity and less foreboding of inevitable doom would have been a better try.