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Perfect Storm, The (HD DVD)
Warner Bros. // PG-13 // June 6, 2006 // Region 0
List Price: $28.99 [Buy now and save at Amazon]
Titanic and Twister both grossed hundreds of millions of dollars theatrically, a fact that I'm sure didn't escape some of the executives at Warner Bros. judging by this blue-collar hybrid of the two. Based on a group of actual fishermen and the Sebastian Junger book their ordeal inspired, The Perfect Storm opens with the return of the Andrea Gail to the Massachusetts port of Gloucester. The swordfishermen on-board are happy to be home but far from thrilled with the meager paychecks they find waiting for them. Billy Tyne (George Clooney) has been on a financially crushing cold streak, and he's too proud to end the season on such a sour note. The men who make up his crew -- John C. Reilly, Mark Wahlberg, William Fichtner, Allen Payne, and John Hawkes -- aren't particularly enthusiastic about venturing out again, but times are tough, and they need the money. This second trip is even more of a disappointment, but the unwaveringly optimistic Tyne then sets his sights toward the distant coasts of Newfoundland. It's a desperate gambit but one that pays off, as the once-barren holds of the Andrea Gail are now filled to the brim with 60,000 pounds of fish. When the ice machine keels over and a nasty storm is blocking their path home, the crew is forced to make a decision: play it safe and risk losing their catch, or plow forward and hope for the best. Tyne and company confidently opt for the latter, not having any inkling that they're marching directly into one of the most devastatingly powerful storms of recent memory.
Much of the first forty minutes of The Perfect Storm are spent in a Gloucester bar where I guess we're supposed to get to know the characters, although I tend to think it's mostly filler tossed in just to break the two hour mark. The movie doesn't care about its characters, and if there were a way The Perfect Storm could've placed a ship in the middle of a tumultuous ILM-crafted ocean without them, I'm sure it would have. No, The Perfect Storm isn't nearly as interested in the crew of the Andrea Gail as it is the big-budget special effects, a shame considering the talents being squandered by this particular cast. That tunnel vision emphasis on effects is misplaced: strong acting and characterization are timeless, but in ten years, a new generation of moviegoers will point at the by-then-outdated CGI in this movie and laugh. Admittedly, the storm sequences really are effective, but it's a long, cliched, and not particularly interesting journey to get to that point, and the characters are so blandly written that I didn't have any emotional investment in the already-well-known outcome. Much too little and far too late.
And on the subject of misplaced emphasis, The Perfect Storm gets distracted from the main story with a couple of subplots with no direct connection to the Andrea Gail. Christopher McDonald hams it up as a cringingly unconvincing TV weatherman who's only around to explain some of the meteorological angles to the audience. The movie periodically cuts to a couple of mammoth shipping vessels whose presence here seems to be based solely on the fact that the computer animators could fling them around their digital ocean like toys in a bathtub. A luxury outing (including Karen Allen in an unexpected bit part) is caught in the same storm on their way to Bermuda, and the heroic men who risk their lives rescuing them in turn find themselves in desperate need of rescuing. Those last subplots could be compelling if they weren't given such short thrift and if the movie were less jarringly able to make the transition from one story to the next.
I'm aware that films are created to coax certain emotions from the audience, but The Perfect Storm feels outright manipulative in its approach. The sappy score by James Horner, the clunky, faux-inspirational dialogue, and some eye-rollingly maudlin, overly melodramatic moments all seem part of a contrived, deliberate tug at viewers' heartstrings (and their wallets, naturally). I'm certain that there's a consistently engaging, thoughtful, exciting film that could've been shaped from the tragedy of the Andrea Gail, but The Perfect Storm isn't it.
Video: I wouldn't be surprised if the high-definition transfer used for The Perfect Storm was minted nearly six years ago, dating back to when the film was initially released on DVD. Of the fourteen HD DVDs I've watched to date, The Perfect Storm is surpassed only by Full Metal Jacket as the least impressive among them. Most close-ups and many medium shots are immediately identifiable as high-definition, if not spectacularly so, but the rest of the movie -- especially when the camera pulls back -- offers only a marginal improvement over what I'd expect from a standard definition DVD. Edges often aren't crisply defined, and fine detail is middling. The image's black levels didn't strike me as being particularly strong, and when the Andrea Gail really starts getting tossed around near the end of the film, a couple of darker patches look unusually noisy. Lackluster all around.
Audio: The Perfect Storm is another Warner release with a Dolby TrueHD track, although it remains unreviewable until hardware that can do much of anything with it is released. The Dolby Digital Plus 5.1 EX track is alright, though. It's the sort of audio I'm sure I would've raved about in 2000, but I'm more jaded these days. There really isn't much for me to write about until the Andrea Gail heads out to sea, but even then, it's not overwhelmingly impressive. Sure, the surround channels are drenched with the sounds of crashing waves and creaking metal. Yes, the collisions of these titanic waves against the mighty ship are accompanied by heavy bass. That doesn't mean it's exceptional, though; that's what it's supposed to do, and these attempts at immersion just sound workmanlike and routine. Not bad, but not especially good either. A couple of scattered stretches of dialogue are also lightly clipped, although it's not a pervasive problem. Fine, but really nothing more than that.
Another Dolby Digital Plus 5.1 track is offered in Quebecois-French, along with a stereo Spanish dub and subtitles in English, French, and Spanish.
Supplements: Another port from the DVD, The Perfect Storm's extras are weighted towards its three commentary tracks. The first of them features director Wolfgang Petersen, the second pairs visual effects producer Helen Elswit with fx supervisor Stefen Fangmeier, and the third and final commentary is offered by author Sebastian Junger. I'll pass on willingly spending another six hours with The Perfect Storm, but if you want detailed thoughts on these commentaries, give Aaron Beierle's review of the DVD release a look. From a quick skim of each track, these discussions cover the sort of ground you'd expect -- Petersen's is a more general overview of the filmmaking process, the commentary with the effects team is directed more towards the technical end of the movie's visuals, and Junger's focuses on the reality of this story and his intense research into it. Junger's commentary is the most unique and compelling of the three.
The lengthiest of the featurettes is a twenty minute HBO First Look special that offers more background information and some genuine making-of details as opposed to just the usual EPK tripe. "Creating an Emotion" spends four minutes with composer James Horner, who comments on his approach to the material along with ample footage of the recording process. The last of the featurettes is "Witness to the Storm", a four and a half minute collection of interviews with people from the area who suffered through the storm, and videotaped footage of the devastation is interspersed throughout. A four minute photo montage, an extremely short plug for the soundtrack, and a standard definition, anamorphic widescreen trailer are provided as well. I believe the original DVD also had a conceptual art gallery and a set of storyboards, but I don't see them anywhere on this new release.
Conclusion: The thinly-written characters and heavy-handed melodrama of The Perfect Storm leave little about the movie to warrant much of a recommendation, and the technical end of this HD DVD is every bit as underwhelming. Rent It.
The images in this review were lifted from Warner's official site for The Perfect Storm. They're just meant to break up the text and aren't necessarily representative of the way this HD DVD looks.
Much of the first forty minutes of The Perfect Storm are spent in a Gloucester bar where I guess we're supposed to get to know the characters, although I tend to think it's mostly filler tossed in just to break the two hour mark. The movie doesn't care about its characters, and if there were a way The Perfect Storm could've placed a ship in the middle of a tumultuous ILM-crafted ocean without them, I'm sure it would have. No, The Perfect Storm isn't nearly as interested in the crew of the Andrea Gail as it is the big-budget special effects, a shame considering the talents being squandered by this particular cast. That tunnel vision emphasis on effects is misplaced: strong acting and characterization are timeless, but in ten years, a new generation of moviegoers will point at the by-then-outdated CGI in this movie and laugh. Admittedly, the storm sequences really are effective, but it's a long, cliched, and not particularly interesting journey to get to that point, and the characters are so blandly written that I didn't have any emotional investment in the already-well-known outcome. Much too little and far too late.
And on the subject of misplaced emphasis, The Perfect Storm gets distracted from the main story with a couple of subplots with no direct connection to the Andrea Gail. Christopher McDonald hams it up as a cringingly unconvincing TV weatherman who's only around to explain some of the meteorological angles to the audience. The movie periodically cuts to a couple of mammoth shipping vessels whose presence here seems to be based solely on the fact that the computer animators could fling them around their digital ocean like toys in a bathtub. A luxury outing (including Karen Allen in an unexpected bit part) is caught in the same storm on their way to Bermuda, and the heroic men who risk their lives rescuing them in turn find themselves in desperate need of rescuing. Those last subplots could be compelling if they weren't given such short thrift and if the movie were less jarringly able to make the transition from one story to the next.
I'm aware that films are created to coax certain emotions from the audience, but The Perfect Storm feels outright manipulative in its approach. The sappy score by James Horner, the clunky, faux-inspirational dialogue, and some eye-rollingly maudlin, overly melodramatic moments all seem part of a contrived, deliberate tug at viewers' heartstrings (and their wallets, naturally). I'm certain that there's a consistently engaging, thoughtful, exciting film that could've been shaped from the tragedy of the Andrea Gail, but The Perfect Storm isn't it.
Video: I wouldn't be surprised if the high-definition transfer used for The Perfect Storm was minted nearly six years ago, dating back to when the film was initially released on DVD. Of the fourteen HD DVDs I've watched to date, The Perfect Storm is surpassed only by Full Metal Jacket as the least impressive among them. Most close-ups and many medium shots are immediately identifiable as high-definition, if not spectacularly so, but the rest of the movie -- especially when the camera pulls back -- offers only a marginal improvement over what I'd expect from a standard definition DVD. Edges often aren't crisply defined, and fine detail is middling. The image's black levels didn't strike me as being particularly strong, and when the Andrea Gail really starts getting tossed around near the end of the film, a couple of darker patches look unusually noisy. Lackluster all around.
Audio: The Perfect Storm is another Warner release with a Dolby TrueHD track, although it remains unreviewable until hardware that can do much of anything with it is released. The Dolby Digital Plus 5.1 EX track is alright, though. It's the sort of audio I'm sure I would've raved about in 2000, but I'm more jaded these days. There really isn't much for me to write about until the Andrea Gail heads out to sea, but even then, it's not overwhelmingly impressive. Sure, the surround channels are drenched with the sounds of crashing waves and creaking metal. Yes, the collisions of these titanic waves against the mighty ship are accompanied by heavy bass. That doesn't mean it's exceptional, though; that's what it's supposed to do, and these attempts at immersion just sound workmanlike and routine. Not bad, but not especially good either. A couple of scattered stretches of dialogue are also lightly clipped, although it's not a pervasive problem. Fine, but really nothing more than that.
Another Dolby Digital Plus 5.1 track is offered in Quebecois-French, along with a stereo Spanish dub and subtitles in English, French, and Spanish.
Supplements: Another port from the DVD, The Perfect Storm's extras are weighted towards its three commentary tracks. The first of them features director Wolfgang Petersen, the second pairs visual effects producer Helen Elswit with fx supervisor Stefen Fangmeier, and the third and final commentary is offered by author Sebastian Junger. I'll pass on willingly spending another six hours with The Perfect Storm, but if you want detailed thoughts on these commentaries, give Aaron Beierle's review of the DVD release a look. From a quick skim of each track, these discussions cover the sort of ground you'd expect -- Petersen's is a more general overview of the filmmaking process, the commentary with the effects team is directed more towards the technical end of the movie's visuals, and Junger's focuses on the reality of this story and his intense research into it. Junger's commentary is the most unique and compelling of the three.
The lengthiest of the featurettes is a twenty minute HBO First Look special that offers more background information and some genuine making-of details as opposed to just the usual EPK tripe. "Creating an Emotion" spends four minutes with composer James Horner, who comments on his approach to the material along with ample footage of the recording process. The last of the featurettes is "Witness to the Storm", a four and a half minute collection of interviews with people from the area who suffered through the storm, and videotaped footage of the devastation is interspersed throughout. A four minute photo montage, an extremely short plug for the soundtrack, and a standard definition, anamorphic widescreen trailer are provided as well. I believe the original DVD also had a conceptual art gallery and a set of storyboards, but I don't see them anywhere on this new release.
Conclusion: The thinly-written characters and heavy-handed melodrama of The Perfect Storm leave little about the movie to warrant much of a recommendation, and the technical end of this HD DVD is every bit as underwhelming. Rent It.
The images in this review were lifted from Warner's official site for The Perfect Storm. They're just meant to break up the text and aren't necessarily representative of the way this HD DVD looks.
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