The Perfect Storm is on Netflix
Ultimately it’s not the fault of Wolfgang Petersen: it wasn’t easy to find a good ending for the story told in The perfect storm, which if it didn’t end the way it does, would be remembered as a film that reflects its title – that is, absolutely perfect. It lasts two hours and ten minutes, and up until the two hour mark it doesn’t do anything wrong. It is the demonstration of how to tell a true story by bending it to the needs of the cinematographic medium and taking the necessary liberties without disrespecting any of the protagonists. It’s one of the best roles of ‘s career George Clooney, despite being nowhere near his most famous. He is a big film, who doesn’t reach a 10 on his report card because at a certain point, due to lack of alternatives, he gives in to the temptation to become a sort of Titanic on a fishing boat.
The perfect storm and historical accuracy
The question of the differences between reality and fiction in The perfect storm (and in the book from which it is officially based) has been discussed for almost a quarter of a century now, to the point of deserving an entire paragraph on the film’s Wiki page and of having sparked lawsuits requested by the families of two of the victims. This is not the place to go into detail and discuss point by point what has been changed and why; However, there is something that we think is worth talking about. As already told at the time, the biggest discrepancy between what happened and what was told in Wolfgang Petersen’s film is in the crew’s reaction to the arrival of the atmospheric event that gives the film its title.
Put more simply: in the film, the crew of the Andrea Gail he realizes the danger he is getting himself into, and communicates it to the character played by Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, who proceeds to make an emergency call alerting the authorities of the situation. In reality, however, that call never took place, and there are no indications that the people on board the Andrea Gail knew what he was getting into. Inexperience? Superficiality? Sensational bad luck? We will never know, the point is that the way this passage is interpreted in The perfect storm it is ten times more powerful than reality, from a dramaturgical point of view. Instead of an accident, the dive into the storm turns into an act of courage and recklessness, a challenge to the elements, a desperate but foolhardy attempt to defeat (or at least survive) something uncontrollable and too big to even be conceived. It is an approach to Moby Dickwhich puts the cold news in the attic to transform the film into an adventure.
And what an adventure!
The secret of The perfect storm is that, when this adventure begins and tosses us for almost an hour between waves as high as a building and winds that would make Trieste pale on its worst days, we too have already been on board the ship for a while Andrea Gail. Petersen’s is one of the most beautiful cinematic portraits that have ever been made of life at sea, and in particular on a half-rusted rig that faces the ocean in the hope of returning safe and sound and with a rich fish haul useful for landing the living of the desperate people who live there. Thanks to the design of the sets, the time that the film takes to let us get to know all the characters, thanks to the actors involved and also to the time that is dedicated to telling the life of those who remain on the shore waiting for the fishing boat to return. There is obviously also a bit of rhetoric, but used with taste and parsimony, just enough to give us not simple names, but well-rounded characters – among which is also included the Andrea Gail.
And so, when the storm begins, we find ourselves rooting for Captain Billy Tine and his crew: it is true that they find themselves in an extreme situation and which they would have done better to avoid, but The perfect storm does everything to make us understand why they actually had no alternatives. There are also socioeconomic discourses behind it, barely mentioned but enough to never surface the kind of thought that alone is capable of killing such stories – the classic “they asked for it”. We want the Andrea Gail come out of the storm alive, because our heroes (fallible, imperfect, irate, sometimes even a little bitchy) they deserve it.
The perfect storm and the imperfect ending
And paradoxically this is the reason why the ending of The perfect storm It’s his weak point. Faced with the cold news truth – that is, the fact that none of the crew members survived the accident – Wolfgang Petersen has to invent a somewhat poetic way to close the film. Think about it Alive – The survivors: there the protagonists survive (at least some of them), and it is therefore enough to tell how things went to close the film in a satisfactory way. The perfect storm it doesn’t have this luxury, and must therefore rely on narrative devices of all kinds so as not to end up as a simple news report.
We therefore have, for example, the voiceover of Mark Wahlberg who bids farewell to his beloved: the two are in a certain sense the true heart of the film, even more than the captain played by George Clooney, because if the latter is a desperate , an Ahab who is looking for one last victory and who knows that his every outing at sea could be his last, Bobby and Chris are two young people full of hope, just waiting for the opportunity to put their “fishing” parenthesis behind them and build a life together. And how do you tell their drama without at least a little romantic rhetoric? Answer: You don’t, at least not in an adventure disaster movie like The perfect storm. In short: doing things properly would have betrayed the previous two hours, but doing them the way Petersen did them is a slightly too corny solution that stains the drama with romance, and leaves a slightly sweet taste in the mouth. As said at the beginning, it’s ultimately not Wolfgang Petersen’s fault The perfect storm it doesn’t get to 10: maybe there was no way to do it, and that’s okay.
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