White Squall (1996)

I really wanted to like this movie. I feel terribly cynical trashing it, and that's why I'm giving it a middling 5. Actually, I'm giving it a 5 because there were some superb performances.

It's funny, it's tense, it features two great performances from two actors and the director expertly creates a web of odd tension where you actually don't know what is happening for the majority of the run time.

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

It’s sentimental, ridiculously long and only occasionally funny

And... this movie just became more significant than its makers ever could have imagined.

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.

I have heard about this movie long time ago, but I have never got a chance to watch it. I finally did it tonight. Even thought it was released in 1995, that was 13 years ago! wow, those actors surely have grown older by now, but it is a timeless classic. So many things happened during that trip, I don't know which is real, which is dramatized. They are all good.The sound effect is very good, I felt as if I was right there on the boat riding the big waves, hearing the sea pranging against the boat. The sceneries are beautiful. The music was good, but it was not impressive. When I was watching the production note on the DVD, I thought that the music sounds a little familiar to music of the pirates of the Caribbean, and indeed, it was the same composer. If he composed a better score for this movie, it could have made this movie even better, such as the scenes for the last moment of Alice and Gil.Even though it is more than 2 hours long, it is worth of the time. The white squall scene was very intense. However, the ending felt a little affectation, especially when the guy rang the bell. Also, Jason Marsden was already 20 at that time, but in the movie, he was supposed to be 15. I don't know how old the other characters were at that time. The actors were probably all older than the ages of the real life boys who were on. this trip.

This is a great film about teenagers learning about themselves and facing a challenge together. It is very interesting that this film avoids the usual clichés of an action movie and develops characters more than just stereotypes. I would describe this film as a drama with a magnificent backdrop of uncontrollable natural events...storms and rough seas. Sort of a parody on some the difficulties that these young men were facing. Ridley Scott directs a film which is unique and pushes back the boundaries of genre as have some of his other films such as ALIEN and GLADIATOR. Both of these films are landmarks in their own way. It's hard to think of a film before ALIEN which had similar qualities. The same with GLADIATOR except perhaps its character development which makes a comparison with KUBRICKS Spartacus. As for homo-eroticism, seeing beautiful young male bodies may subjectively be deemed homo-erotic by some people. Does it really matter? Just enjoy the film on your own level as you would other works of art!!!