Herald rating: * *
Cast: George Clooney, Mark Wahlberg, Diane Lane, Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio
Director: Wolfgang Petersen
Rating: M (low-level offensive language)
Running time: 125 minutes
Opens: Now showing Village, Hoyts, Berkeley cinemas
Review: Russell Baillie
There is something wrong when a movie based on a true story is actually saved by an artificiality.
In this case it's the technical wizardy which recreates the brutal weather which hit the North American Altantic seaboard in October 1991, the subsequent catastrophes at sea from that historic meteorologial event becoming the subject of Sebastian Junger's 1997 gripping and meticulous bestseller.
It's hard not to be equally enthralled and shaken by the final reels, where we witness the fate of the fishing boat the Andrea Gail and her crew - which the film extrapolates from Junger's work - as well as the subplot following the helicopter rescue of a stricken yacht's crew and its own ironic aftermath.
But there is much that is awful about the early parts of the film. It's as if director Petersen - undoubtedly qualified for the job because of the sealegs and feel for nautical claustrophobia he acquired when making Das Boot - is awaiting for his special-effects budget to be approved for much of the first hour.
Certainly, screenwriter William Wittiliff boils down to a superficial pulp Junger's contemplation of the six-man crew of the Andrea Gail, their nearest and dearest, and the Gloucester Massachusetts fishing community. But the melodrama and dialogue are so leaden it may come back in another life as a keel. And James Horner's relentlessly swelling score is more likely to induce motion sickness than the rolling decks.
You start to feel sympathy for those in front of the camera.
Clooney and Wahlberg (as longliner captain Billy Tyne) and Bobby Shatford (crew member) appear to think they are in a much better movie. But around them things clang - like Tyne's little speech to fellow skipper Lina Greenlaw (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio) about the joys of being a swordboat captain that sounds as if it was composed by the Old Sea Dog Greeting Card Company.
There's four other crew too, all with their own soap operas left on the dock as the Andrea Gail heads out for one last haul of the season.
But if those characters are ciphers on dry land, it's hard not to become attached to their fates even before the swell comes up.
When it does - with black mountainous waves and a skies of inky menace - it chills deeply, then thrills. Though as the megastorm unfolds, the film's depicition of the Andrea Gail's battle brings with it a sense of unease with the visceral excitement. It is, yes, a sinking feeling which has to do with making a rollercoaster ride out of a real-life tragedy. Here "based on a true story" should have meant something more than showing - spectacularly as it turns out - just how cruel the sea can be.
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