The Perfect Storm is a 2000 American biographical disaster drama film directed by Wolfgang Petersen and based on the 1997 creative non-fiction book of the same name by Sebastian Junger.

The film was adapted by William D. Wittliff, with an uncredited rewrite by Bo Goldman, and tells the story of Andrea Gail, a commercial fishing vessel that was lost at sea with all hands after being caught in the Perfect Storm of 1991.

[4] The film stars George Clooney, Mark Wahlberg, Diane Lane, William Fichtner, Karen Allen, Bob Gunton, Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, and John C. Reilly.

The crew heads out past their usual fishing grounds on the Grand Banks of Newfoundland, leaving a developing tropical storm behind them.

After amassing thousands of pounds of fish, the ice machine breaks down; the only way to sell their catch before it spoils is to hurry back to shore.

Andrea Gail endures various problems including 40-foot (12 m) waves crashing onto the deck, a broken stabilizer ramming the side of the ship with a loose anchor, and two crew members briefly getting thrown overboard.

[11] The conditions, though threatening, were probably not unfamiliar to Tyne, who had been a successful fisherman for about a decade on other vessels, taking trips to the Grand Banks and fishing off Florida, the Carolinas, and elsewhere.

[11] Hurricane Grace is exaggerated in the movie when it is referred to by a weather forecaster as a "category 5" storm, which has winds sustained at over 137 knots (≥ 157 mph).

[14] In reality, the hurricane had already peaked at category 2 intensity and ocean buoy monitors recorded wind gusts at 65 knots (75 mph) around the time Andrea Gail sank.

"My one gripe about [the] movie was how Warner Brothers depicted Billy Tyne and his crew as making a very conscious decision to steam into a storm that they knew was dangerous," said Greenlaw.

The helicopter departed mid-storm on a mission to help save a lone Japanese fisherman from a sinking sailboat 250 miles off the New Jersey coast.

Unsuccessful and running low on fuel, the Air National Guard Sikorsky HH-60G helicopter was compelled to attempt a mid-flight refueling maneuver.

The zero-visibility conditions thwarted their efforts, however, and lacking enough fuel to make the flight back to the Long Island base, the crew were forced to ditch the helicopter.

[16] In response to requests by the crew, Captain Ray Leonard permitted the two crewmembers, Karen Stimpson and Susan Bylander, to make a position report over radio, during which they made an unauthorized Mayday call.

After the storm, Leonard searched for the Satori, hoping to find her still afloat, but in spite of his attempts she was found a few days later washed ashore on a Maryland beach, a bag of personal belongings still on deck.

[17] At the time, The Perfect Storm scored the third-highest Fourth of July opening weekend, after Independence Day and Men in Black.

But its quotient of human drama is finally too stingy for the personal stories of a group of New England fishermen battling "the storm of the century" to hit the emotional bull's-eye....

When in its final scenes the movie desperately tries to churn up some of the celestial schmaltz of Titanic, it is too little too late and feels obligatory despite the abundance of heart and chemistry that Mark Wahlberg and Diane Lane bring to their roles of a wildly-in-love young couple....Mr. Clooney conveys a darkly heroic gravity, but his lack of even a trace of New England accent makes him seem socially out of place in a cast whose other members get the regional dialect more or less right.

[25] Jeffrey Westhoff of Northwest Herald gave the film a rating of two out of four, saying, "Once the digital effects commence, The Perfect Storm has all the impact of watching a friend play Nintendo.

[33] The district court, which is also located in Florida, dismissed the case, as in their opinion the defendants' First Amendment right to freedom of speech barred the suit.