|
THE PERFECT STORM |
| This is the film that George Lucas would love to make but never will and
I will tell you why in a minute. But first I want to say thanks to Harry
Knowles and the ainitcool website. I started writing the Lizard’s Lair
reviews because I knew of only one review writer I could trust and that
was Harry. I don’t know Harry and I’ve never corresponded with him but
I rely on his reviews to check out what is worth seeing and what isn’t.
So it was the fact that Harry was knocked out by this film that had me
rushing over to my local cinema to see the first preview showing at 12
noon. Harry was right about how good the film is.
The plot is simple. Half a dozen regular fishermen (well regular except for the fact that one looks like George Clooney and one looks like Mark Wahlberg) set out catch swordfish and get caught up in a monster storm. Essentially you get one hour of build up and characterisation and one hour of the storm. In this respect it is a very conventional film and it is quite shameless in the way it manipulates emotions to get you to care about the characters, and even though you can see every last scrap of the manipulative elements you do care about the characters. What is so special about this film though is the storm sequences which are an absolute knockout from beginning to end. I don’t remember ever being so on the edge of my seat in a film (Petersen’s earlier Das Boot came pretty close though) even though I knew what the ending was. Henceforth a film’s grippingness can only be measured against The Perfect Storm. You go in being prepared to see big seas and men being thrown about on sets on rollers but when you are watching it you just can’t believe how awesome the scenes are that you are watching. And it just goes on and on and on – bigger, louder, more outrageous. Now the reason George Lucas would love to make a film this good but never will is all about the effects. You know that you must be watching models or larger mock-ups in some of the scenes. You know the action must have been filmed in tanks under controlled conditions. You know that you must be watching mechanical effects and computer-generated effects and blue screen work. These techniques are the only way that a lot of this film could be made. Yet I could not see the seams at any point in this film. I could not see which were models, which effects, which blue screens. The whole damn thing is so completely seamless that every single scene looks authentic. Now I don’t care what you say but even otherwise excellent films like Titanic and Gladiator have some truly awful effects – in both of the films mentioned the worst effects are the large scale flyovers of huge computer generated sets – they look good but not good enough to convince me. George Lucas has an avowed intent of making films which seamlessly blend live action, animated characters and CGI effects and we all know how tragically he failed to achieve this in the Phantom Menace, one of the worst films in the history of cinema. The Perfect Storm though succeeds even though some of the characters and conveyer-belt script are as cardboard as Star Wars characters. The action and the effects are just that good that they run the film and as a viewer you are completely swept away by them. Lucas should be so lucky – he should obviously give up directing immediately and let the real innovators in ILM, the guys who did the effects for this movie, take over. If The Perfect Storm doesn’t excite you as a piece of film making, even if the storyline is by-the-numbers, then I find it hard to believe you like films at all and you would be better off reading a book. This is easily the best film of the year 2000 so far and I’d be surprised if anything can better it. |