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I watched this movie because I thought I'd heard some pretty enthusiastic reviews of it, but it didn't work for me. I didn't care about most of the characters, and I didn't find the storm all that visceral or scary; and those issues would be bad enough were it not for the long-winded exposition that plagues the movie. The first twenty minutes in particular are full of people explaining things to the audience disguised as dialogue. Just clunky.

I like the actors. I like Mark Wahlberg; I like Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio; I like George Clooney a lot. But it felt to me like none of them had much interesting to do here, and when they did it was too melodramatic. In a character-oriented movie, something interesting could've been done with the quasi-romantic tension between Mastrantonio and Clooney (twist my arm, force me to watch love scenes between those two—oh, my life is so difficult), but not here.

Ebert's review notes that the movie's not about characters, it's about the storm. Okay, fair enough—but then we're left with the problem that, as noted above, the storm was imo kinda boring. I couldn't see the seams in the special effects, but it was kind of the same special effect over and over again. I did some empathetic wincing over moments that looked particularly physically painful, but that was about it.

There was one aspect of this movie that I found very compelling: the Coast Guard rescue people. Their story was totally irrelevant to what appeared to be the main story of the movie, but I nonetheless found their story much more interesting, and much more tense, than the main story. Part of that, I suppose, was that I cared about them, for the simple reason that they were the really heroic people in the movie. Most of the characters in the movie recklessly and stupidly endanger not only themselves but the rescue people; meanwhile, the rescue people are out there saving lives at the risk of their own. I imagine that's dramatized too; I'm sure not all rescue workers are completely selfless in all ways at all times. Nonetheless, that part of the story worked for me.

But it wasn't enough. An hour into the movie, I looked at the time and considered giving up, but decided I was halfway through it and might as well watch the rest. Half an hour later, I almost gave up again, but decided that since I was that close to the end, I might as well finish. But this is as close as I've come to giving up on a movie in a long time.

And I grew to loathe the damn six-note theme that came up in the soundtrack approximately every ten seconds.

I have one more thing to say about this movie, but it regards the ending, and thus it's a major spoiler if you don't already know how the movie ends. So if you don't want to know how it ends, don't read the rest of this.

I warned you!

Okay, so I was actually surprised by the ending. I assumed that all the characters would survive (or maybe all but one or two who would die heroically). Right up to the end, I assumed that at least the Wahlberg character would survive, because if not, then how do we know the "true story" that this movie is based on? But no, the entire crew dies. Which means that everything after the Andrea Gail lost radio contact is entirely fictional. It could be that the A.G. went down immediately after their last transmission. So what's intended to be the most dramatic half-hour of this "true story" movie is entirely invented. And chances are that all of the drama onboard the A.G. is entirely fictional, even before they lost radio contact, unless they described all that in radio communication to home, which seems unlikely. It's not that I object to a fictional movie by any means, or to fictionalizing a true story (all retellings are in a sense fictionalizings, to my way of thinking, even if they attempt to be factual; even straightforward history is filtered through the historian's perceptions and biases); it's that they made a big deal out of this being a true story, when a great deal of the main story of the movie has no known factual basis whatsoever.