"The Perfect Storm"

The Gloucester fishermen on the Andrea Gail all die. While any filmmaker would have to take liberties in imagining the last moments of men dying at sea, there's something a little queasy about the way Petersen fills in so much detail, in ways Junger was careful not to. In real life, the families of the men upon whom these characters were based continue to mourn them. When "The Perfect Storm" feels more like an entertainment than a tragedy, it does a grave disservice to their memory.

But even for all the ways it's indefensible, "The Perfect Storm" -- thanks perhaps mostly to those key early scenes, where we're made to see each of the men as individuals -- does manage to scratch its way to some core of true feeling. We're privy to the crew's moments of bliss (happily cranking up ZZ Top's "Tush" on a boombox as they set to work on the boat) as well as their fear. They become real enough to us so that we miss them when they're gone. And like Junger's book, it assesses the effect that a horrific storm can have on a community not just in terms of onshore property damage and lives lost. How many times have we heard a TV weatherman say with relief, after a major storm has wreaked its damage on land, something like, "The storm is now headed out to sea"?

And as summer blockbusters go, "The Perfect Storm" is highly unorthodox in the way it draws a pall of despair around it like a nighttime blanket. Perhaps the key to that despair rests with Lane's performance. Lane attempts a Boston accent, and unlike Wahlberg's (which is natural; he was raised in Boston), it doesn't work.

But that one misstep in judgment, enough to sabotage a lesser performance, hardly matters here. Lane pours so much tough-girl longing into her character. Her reluctance to let Bobby go, the fact that she hauls off and gives him a shiner his last night at home and, most of all, the unrelieved sadness she feels when he's thousands of miles away with nothing too significant around him but sea and sky and her picture in his bunk -- as she plays them, they're all deeply personal and archetypal at once, underscoring everything that's elemental, and compelling, about stories of men going off to sea.

"There are houses in Gloucester," Junger wrote, "where grooves have been worn into the floorboards by women pacing past an upstairs window, looking out to sea." Lane's Chris is the modern version, suggesting that it's not just the spirits of the dead men that haunt this particular story, but also the sorrow of every girl who's never gotten the chance to say goodbye.

• View blog reactions