The Perfect Storm (2000)
Directed by Wolfgang Petersen
In October 1991, a confluence of weather conditions combined to form a killer storm in the North Atlantic. Caught in the storm was the sword-fishing boat Andrea Gail.
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What critics compared The Perfect Storm to
Belier’s French dairy farm-backdrop becomes a tight-knit American coastal community, one we’re familiar with from dramas like The Perfect Storm , Blow the Man Down or Manchester By the Sea .
“Aquaman” is a derivative heap; an observant movie buff will catch pieces from “Excalibur” and “Mysterious Island,” while a sequence of waves crashing and rocking a boat looks like scenes cribbed from “The Perfect Storm.”
I saw echoes of everything from all four Indiana Jones movies, Jurassic Park , The Perfect Storm , Splash , and a smidge of The Little Mermaid , not to mention the Star Wars franchise and practically every other space-battle film.
…think “Old Man and the Sea” by way of “The Perfect Storm” ?
Maybe not in the same minimalist style — but, between Castaway , Life of Pi , The Perfect Storm and The Old Man and the Sea (fun fact: Spencer Tracy was 57 when he made that; Redford’s 77), these are familiar waters.
Unfortunately, even director Wolfgang Petersen ("Das Boot" 1981, "The Perfect Storm" 2000, and "Air Force One" 1997), along with screenwriter David Benioff, cannot wrestle Homer's 2,700-year-old, 15,693-line poem "The Iliad" down to the time frame of a feature-length film.
The Trojan War from 3,200 years ago is simplified in the old-fashioned 1950s epic Hollywood style through German action director Wolgang Petersen ("Das Boot," but since then a Hollywood action film director with films such as "The Perfect Storm"), and the screenplay is written by David Benioff ("25th Hour") as inspired by Homer's The Iliad.
Screenwriter David Benioff ("25th Hour") strips Homer's epic poem down to the human tragedies wrought by battles fought for pride, greed and lust while director Wolfgang Petersen ("The Perfect Storm") and his cinematographer Roger Pratt ("Iris") fetishize their Achilles, Brad Pitt, with more gusto than they do the woman whose face launched all those boats.
I don?t know if German-born director Petersen, whose more recent credits include Outbreak, Air Force One, and The Perfect Storm , and writer Benioff, who broke onto the scene two years ago with the Spike Lee-directed adaptation of his own novel 25th Hour, intended for this to be a tribute to those extremely expensive, showy, and badly acted classics of the 1960s like The Ten Commandments and Ben-Hur, or whether it happened by accident.
Director Wolfgang Petersen, adept at heart-pounding action ( "The Perfect Storm," "Air Force One," "In the Line of Fire"), guides the battle scenes with a sure hand and a sharp eye for exciting visuals.
Director Wolfgang Petersen is aboard Troy, and after a few hit-and-miss blockbusters (his last movie was the waterlogged The Perfect Storm), he has made his most robust yet complex film since Das Boot, the U-boat drama that launched him internationally.
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They land on one planet that seems all sea, only to face mountain-high waves—at which point the film turns into The Perfect Storm.
In just one of many eye-popping moments, one of the potential new homes Coop and his crew visits is plagued by enormous walls of water that make those waves in “The Perfect Storm” look like flatulence in a bathtub.
He has alternated parts in projects like "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" "Intolerable Cruelty," and the three "Ocean's" movies with "The Perfect Storm," "Good Night, and Good Luck," "Syriana," "The Good German," and the 2007 film we're discussing here, "Michael Clayton," which may his best starring vehicle to date.
An Afghanistan war veteran, he can drive any vehicle and does, including a chopper, a 4x4, a plane, and a boat, piloting the last into and over a tsunami wave in a move that makes you think he might have been helpful in The Perfect Storm or maybe The Impossible.
Even the Ten Commandments themselves are regulated to a quiet, non-bombastic coda, which stands in stark relief to the film’s most ostentatious stunner of an image: a horse rendered tiny as it stands in front of the hugest wave outside of “The Perfect Storm.”
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"2012," which samples everything from "Earthquake" to "The Perfect Storm" to "The Towering Inferno" to the Bible, will appeal to the baser instincts in anyone who lapped up Emmerich's schlocktastic "10,000 B.C." Which makes one of us, at least.
Inspired by popular pseudoscientific claims that the Mayan calendar predicts the world will end on Dec. 12, 2012, the film is a sort of disaster-genre greatest hits collection, gathering the tidal waves from "The Perfect Storm" and "The Poseidon Adventure," the temblors from "Earthquake," the volcanoes from "Volcano" and "Dante's Peak," the fireballs from "Armageddon," and other special-effects traumas into that paradoxical form of entertainment that allows viewers to escape their real-life woes by imagining something far, far worse.
Although he's not present for long, Sean Bean ("The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring," "Don't Say a Word") appears as the original partner, while William Fichtner ("Black Hawk Down," "The Perfect Storm") plays a rebel leader.