The Perfect Storm was one the best and scariest books that I have read.  In the book, there is a description of a supertanker caught in the storm which had the windows of its wheel house broken by a wave.  The wheel house was 90 feet above the waterline.  In the movie, Industrial Light and Magic try to recreate the fury of this storm but no matter what they do, their effects can't compete with my imagination as I was reading the book. Nevertheless, The Perfect Storm, the movie is very good. As everyone must know by now, this is the story of a fishing boat from Gloucester, Massachusetts which was lost without a trace during the biggest storm in the Atlantic since records have been kept.  The term, Perfect Storm, refers to how three separate storms combined to form a one huge storm with hurricane winds and waves a hundred feet high.  The crew of the Andrea Gail led by George Clooney, Mark Wahlberg (wearing a Red Sox hat), and John C. Reilly all do an excellent job as do their friends and family on shore including Diane Lane.  Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio is very good as one of Clooney's fellow fishing boat captains.  There is no real villain besides the storm itself, but the inimitable Michael Ironside plays the nasty boat owner with his usual menace.  The first half of the movie is best where we see the life of the fishermen in Gloucester and on the boat. The director, Wolfgang Peterson, most famous for another wet movie, Das Boot, shows us the hard life the fishermen lead and also how the sea keeps drawing them back.  Wahlberg and Lane are particularly good together.  And Clooney manages to portray the solitary life of the captain without becoming Ahab.  Once the storm begins, it is just waves and water splashing over the crew as they fight to stay alive.  The effects are good but the waves still look a bit unreal.  As the storm progresses, the story follows another boat in distress and the Coast Guard unit sent to rescue them.  The crew of the other boat sailing appropriately into the Bermuda Triangle includes Karen Allen who has been pretty much missing since she had such a great start to her career in the early 80's with Raiders of the Lost Ark and Starman.  Unfortunately, we don't know who the hell these people on the other boat are. It would have been better to have had a little background on them as we do for the crew of the Andrea Gail. Since this is a true story and they didn't change the ending, we know what is coming for George Clooney et al.  In real life, the Andrea Gail disappeared without a trace and we don't know anything about the last hours of the crew.  They have tried to recreate their last moments here. I think this was the weakest part of the film. It would have been better to leave it a bit mysterious and just to see them disappear over a wave, leaving it to our imagination.