Down with the "Ps"

Both The Perfect Storm and The Patriot rely on compelling real-life events to build characters and advance plot lines. But Hollywood keeps stepping in.

When Mission: Impossible 2 has to be dumbed down from the original (which, frankly, was not rocketry), you know you've got a problem. Summer blockbusters have grown increasingly vapid in recent years (Will Smith's oeuvre should suffice as evidence). The trend has grown so strong that many critics now deliver reviews in couched terms: "The story is weak, the characters are cardboard and the plot twists are preposterous, but the special effects make it the perfect summer movie." But who's to blame? Some say that big-time studios have forgotten how to tell a good story. The studios, on the other hand, say viewers have forgotten how to appreciate one.

So perhaps the fact that the two biggest mid-summer blockbusters are based either mostly (The Perfect Storm) or partially (The Patriot) on real-life stories is evidence of a compromise. Unfortunately, although both films rent reality to a large degree, the only thing compromised in both cases is the quality of the film.

The Perfect Storm is based on the true story of the Andrea Gail, a Gloucester, Massachusetts-based fishing boat lost at sea during a massive storm that devastated the Eastern Seaboard in 1991. To be more exact, it is based on Sebastian Junger's book of the same name. The book, which documents the story of the storm and those it affected, must have seemed like a natural for the big screen. But movies, especially summer movies, are subjected to different demands than are books, and The Perfect Storm rushes headlong into the pitfalls of the crossover process.

The Perfect Storm tries to remain as faithful to reality as possible, keeping the names, dates, known events (and even the Pepsi cans) true to the originals. But Wolfgang Petersen seems handcuffed by the script, which is obsessed with fleshing out the relationships between the crewmembers and their families, in order to emphasize the human interest element of the story. Only the residents of Gloucester know if the dialogue on shore was this flat in reality. But the real problem is that nobody knows if the dialogue on the ship was that bad - because nobody survived! And anyone that had read the book or any of the pre-release promotional materials would have known this (hint: "ill-fated" is not a positive adjective).

All of the action on the boat after its last radio contact is purely conjecture, and there's plenty of it. The crew goes through a series of rescues and crises while trying to navigate the storm. Although these trials would certainly make for exciting fiction, there is something self-defeating, if not morbid, about playing with the lives of dead men - especially real dead men. To make matters worse, Petersen is also charged with keeping us updated on an unrelated rescue in the Bermuda area. Absolutely no background on these imperiled boaters is provided whatsoever. One of them is Karen Allen, who played Marian Ravenswood in Raiders of the Lost Ark. Are we expected to pull for her out of sheer habit? This adventure then shifts to the U.S. Coast Guard helicopter rescue team, which tries desperately to avoid befalling the same fate that they had just delivered Karen Allen et al. from. I guess the story about the deceased real-life fishermen just wasn't exciting enough to carry the load by itself after all.

In the end, The Perfect Storm is undermined by its own adherence to reality, while allowing some of its more interesting elements (the science of the storm, the techniques of swordfishing, etc.) to be crowded out. The movie probably would have worked better as an extended piece on Dateline NBC, which could have played up the facts and the real-life drama without the Hollywood conjecture and the Pepsi advertisements. Unfortunately, Dateline isn't known for its special effects (unless, of course, GM trucks are involved).

To work as movie, The Perfect Storm would have been better off developing a fictional story within the larger context of the actual storm. That's exactly the approach that The Patriot takes toward its real-life inspiration, putting Mel Gibson's fictional Benjamin Martin within the context of the American War of Independence. Unfortunately, the results are just as lackluster.

To say that most people went to The Patriot expecting an "American" Braveheart would be an understatement of epic proportions (no pun intended). But the parallels between The Patriot and the film that remains Gibson's cinematic peak have all of the subtlety of a Midtown jackhammer. The Patriot delivers all of Braveheart's goods in a shiny new package: the would-be pacifist driven to war by personal grief, an army of ragtag, underdog patriots long on élan but short on tactical sense and epic battle scenes with gruesome action true to the technology of the times. Hell, even the British are back to reprise their star-making turn from Braveheart as "The Most Evil Race on Earth."

Perhaps it is this smothering familiarity that leaves The Patriot less compelling than its "Scottish" predecessor. You'd think the differences between watching a bunch of Australians dress up like Americans and watching a bunch of Australians dress up as Scotsmen would be negligible. Gibson, who has apparently finished his latest round of slumming (with the likes of Payback and the final Lethal Weapon installment), delivers a passionate and wholly believable performance, as do many his co-stars. Even Jason Isaacs manages to inject his laughably one-dimensional role with some complexity - a testament to his talent as an actor. And technically, there shouldn't be a more rousing story to the American public - even though it's essentially about a bunch of wealthy aristocrats who simply don't want to pay their taxes (a theme that remains the ideological basis of the Republican Party).

But alas, something is slightly out of whack with The Patriot. Like The Perfect Storm, the film struggles with its relationship with reality. You'd think that the birth-struggle of what has become the world's only superpower would make a compelling story in and of itself, yet The Patriot goes very light on the historical details, instead relegating them to little more than footnotes or plot devices in service of the presumably much more compelling Hollywood story of the family man who returns to soldiering. And like in Braveheart, many legends of the war are either amalgamated, grossly exaggerated, or outright fabricated (e.g., the absolutely ludicrous church-burning scene) to heighten the dramatic effect. Even Saving Private Ryan, with its asinine plot, knew where its bread was buttered (the battle re-creations), and went back to the basket at the end.