White Squall

Rarely have I heard such a terrible narrative. The story line is 'washed out' and the dialogue is utter rubbish; it's totally unbelievable. I couldn't sit through the entire video in one setting it was so bad I watched another film in hope that something better might happen in the second setting: hardly likely. A total waste of time.

What this film is, is basically a hybrid of "Dead Poets Society", and "The Poseiden Adventure". Jeff Bridges leads a group of boys on a ship where they learn, as well as do vigorous physical exercises. Of course every boy has some problem, let it be grades arn't high enough, or fear of heights, or problems with parents. The cast is very good, but the script is rather weak, leaving the film rather uninvolving. Still its usually entertaining, and all of the ocean water is refreshing to look at. I'll give it a 6.5/10.

The story, as I understand, is "based on real events." That can be either good or bad, depending on what sort of license is taken with those real events and how they are rendered. In this case, the results are enough to gag a maggot. I wasn't expecting much going in -- anticipating a story of rich high-school kids taking an ocean cruise under a stern skipper. That is, what I figured was a coming-of-age movie along the lines of something about boot camp or basic training, the kind in which the drill sergeant says, "My duty is to snap you out of your winsome civilian ways." Well, it IS that, in a way. The kids start out as kids and end up as an organic group. But this is far hokier than any boot-camp movie I've ever seen, outside of a deliberate comedy. Who WROTE this thing? The air is filled with slogans that belong, not in high school, but in the third grade. The dialog offends the ear. Jeff Bridges usually does a better-than-average job but in this case his performance is mediocre. He brings nothing extra to the part, although given his lines, it's hard to know how he could do much with them. The rest of the cast is undistinguished and a few of the kids are painfully inadequate. There's a lot of tearing up, and considerable crying. The best scene involves a dolphin. The immature clichés continue to the very end. The Coast Guard is cast in the role of the hard-hearted court at the hearing that follows the disaster. The interrogator does nothing but hit Bridges over the head with his misinterpretations and misconstruction of events. "You let the crew drink alcohol, didn't you?" (A couple of harmless drinks.) "And you didn't punish them, though you punished them for killing a fish." (The dolphin business.) The technical details surrounding the sinking are left murky. What is a "white squall" anyway? And if it's as dangerous as Bridges claims, why weren't the whole crew alerted and wearing life vests? But why go on? If "The Albatross" were a Dreadnaught, it would still be torpedoed and sunk by the ludicrous comic-book script.

We all know that Ridley Scott's standard visual signature is of fabric caught in the wind and so this film must be his ultimate dream. It is set on board a sailing ship and we are treated to many shots of the wind filling the ship's sails. Sadly, like the sails, the film as a whole is rather over-blown. The plot revolves around a dozen or so spoilt little rich brats spending a summer on a sailing ship under the tutelage of martinet Jeff Bridges, whose job is seemingly to make them confront their fears and emotional turmoils. And by god, they have emotional turmoils aplenty. Each teenaged boy has an easily identifiable trauma to deal with: one kid wets himself (literally!) at the thought of heights, one has dyslexia and is thus at war with everyone, one hates his father etc etc. The central brat is a budding writer and he is the 15 year old who, towards the end of the film, claims that "I still don't know who I am..." But then who does at 15? All the troubled lads - some of them virtually certifiable - spend lots of time losing their tempers, fighting with each other and then, once they realise how unreasonably they have behaved, they immediately burst into cathartic tears, hug everyone in sight and are one step closer to spiritual enlightenment and manhood. For me this is the film's downfall. White Squall is based on a true story. Jeff Bridges plays the ship's skipper who, during the Sixties, took a boat-load of teenaged lads on a summer's voyage around the Caribbean, only to have the ship sink in the eponymous storm, with the loss of life. The potential is there for a great action film with plenty to say about responsiblity and personal growth but sadly Ridley Scott over-inflates the human interaction to Jerry Springer-sized proportions. At least Jeff Bridges is reliable as always. He must be one of the most underrated yet outstanding actors there is. At least, I thought, Jeff won't start blubbing at the drop of a hat. Sadly, in the final scene (and watch out for it, the bell ringing is pure ham!), he succumbs to the director's dictates and has a group-sob with the surviving members of the lachrymous brats. D'oh! Plus points are Jeff Bridges, the ship and the photography. Minus points are the rest of the actors and the script. Still, worse things have happened at sea...

What happens when you throw together too many uninteresting characters and try to make something way more dramatic than it needs to be. You get Ridley Scott's White Squall. This film is based on a true story from 1960 when a group of schoolboys took to the open seas to learn about discipline and becoming a man. The ship is called the Albatross and the captain is the hard boiled Christopher Sheldon, played by Jeff Bridges. The boys learn about what it takes to become a man and the self discipline needed to be an honorable and respected individual. But it is a tragic storm that teaches them some difficult lessons about life and death. This film is, for the most part, a character driven story. This is a real problem when you could care less about any of the characters. Character with daddy issues. Check. Macho man who can't read or write. Check. Highly intelligent character that, despite all his book smarts, still has a lot to learn. Check. One dimensional narrator. Check. The list goes on, but my point is that this film has all the necessary stereotypes for your most typical coming of age story. Thus this film permits nothing new or interesting. Another problem could be that there are just too many characters. The film tries to develop all of the boys and they are subsequently underdeveloped. You don't have enough time or information to develop a connection with any one character and so everything that happens with these boys is incredibly uninteresting. There is also a very flat dynamic between characters. They are all pretty white boys that come from upper class American families making the characters devoid of any kind of diversity. The biggest issue here is that the film truly believes it possesses everything I just said it didn't have. It tries so hard to be a gripping drama but its character development completely missed the mark, making all of these "dramatic" scenes silly and moronic. I could care less about one boys success at learning how to read and write from the help of two other boys because his character is obnoxious, underdeveloped, and flat. Yet the film tries so hard to elicit an emotional response here that I want to ignore it even further. Aesthetically this film is a different story. Ridley Scott is in no way a bad director, it just seems like he had a serious string of duds post Blade Runner. He makes the most out of White Squall with an epic scale ocean scope. The climactic scene of the film is the terrible storm that hits the Albatross and Scott shoots this scene magnificently. He manages to make this the only truly dramatic moment of the film and the scene manages to be as riveting as is possible for such a lackluster film. In a way this makes the film more of a disappointment. If I had cared more about the film before the epic storm scene, this scene would have been more powerful than it already was. It really makes me wish more effort had been put into the first two thirds of the film because the last third, even after the storm scene, is pretty decent. The film also concludes very well, making the film a would be satisfying experience. White Squall is an overall mediocre cinematic experience. Not nearly enough effort was put into developing the array of characters who were the most important focus of this film. Ridley Scott directs as well as he can for such a poor script, but it doesn't save White Squall from being a major disappointment.

As a person who knows the filmed ship and some other ships, too, I cannot see the movie as a movie, only. As a movie is has some great, wonderful shots of the ship, most of them done on an existing vessel - apart of the ones in the disaster scenes, of course, and a certain room under deck. But regarding the story and dialogs I only can call it big crap. Nothing of that would happen like this on a real sailing vessel. No wonder, the film had bad impact on the existing ship - if I didn't know better, I wasn't tempted to do a sailing voyage for sure. Definitely, for Europeans I recommend to switch off once the ship ran aground. After that, the over-emotional, very American part begins which I couldn't bear. The pics are really, really great, no wonder in a Ridley Scott film, but if you can avoid listening to the text, it will become much better.

For at least 3 years I picked up this film at our local video store - and passed it up, groaning to myself that I was not interested in seeing a family style flick about a group of adolescents. Getting desperate to find a video one evening, I decided to take a chance. My wife and I really did enjoy this movie! Good solid acting, acceptable script, and an interesting story that happens to be true. If you are so addicted to the usual action or sex film, then maybe you will not like this film. But if you can appreciate good wholesome qualities, then this flick should be tried. The suspense is quite good - better than I expected, and the special effects are excellent.

It's 1960. Chuck Gieg (Scott Wolf) decides to attend school on sailing vessel Albatross instead of going to an Ivy League school. He joins other boys like rich kid Frank Beaumont (Jeremy Sisto), fearful Gil Martin (Ryan Phillippe) and Dean Preston (Eric Michael Cole) who struggles with school. The ship is run by skipper Sheldon (Jeff Bridges), his wife Dr. Alice Sheldon (Caroline Goodall) and McCrea (John Savage). The skipper intends to make the boys ship shape as they sail around in the Caribbeans. I don't really feel for any of the kids. There are just so many of them and everybody has their problems. It gets bog down with their melodrama. It's too long. Jeff Bridges is powerful. I wonder if the drama would be more compelling if the movie starts with the ship in the storm and then flash backs to the beginning. Around midway, the drama tries to pump up the tension but I never feel for them. The storm scenes look well made.

Based on R1 DVD 129 min. Maybe I'm getting dumber in my old age but for most of the movie I had trouble putting a character to the faces on screen maybe it's because much of the story takes place off screen. The characters behave in ways unexplained by the story with apparent rivals helping each other as if deep bonds formed within the clips on the cutting room floor. 5/10 catch it on TV.

***** MILD SPOILER ***** Made during Ridley Scott`s career doldrum between THELMA AND LOUISE and GLADIATOR , WHITE SQUALL is a rather shapeless story . It first starts off as a sort of DEAD POET`S SOCIETY on the high seas then becomes a disaster movie where several characters die during a shipwreck and becomes a courtroom drama at the end . Three quarters of the film are dedicated to the rites of passage tale while only the last quarter involves the shipwreck and court case . Considering the title of the film you`d have thought the shipwreck would have made up the bulk of the film . WHITE SQUALL isn`t a terrible film but it wasn`t a good one either and it`s difficult to have either anything good or bad to say about hence this bland review