White Squall Review by Beth Ann Griese

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Starring	Jeff Bridges, Scott Wolf, Balthazar Getty, Caroline Goodall
Director	Ridley Scott
Year	1996
What it's worth		Forget It (You'd have to pay me to see it again.)

The story is about a unique school in the early 1960s, a high school on a clipper ship named the Albatross, where the boys who are students learn the teamwork and discipline needed for manning a ship while they study their three Rs. We watch the central boy, Chuck Gieg (Scott Wolf, who looks unnervingly like Tom Cruise of ten years ago) meet some of the other boys who will be his shipmates for the next year. Some of them seem to know each other, but we never get a clear idea of where or how. It's only one of the many small details that get left behind in favor of projecting an image.

We never know that these boys learn teamwork, or how; we're just told it. They go from being a bickering bunch of boys trying to out-cool each other to a team of young men without a bit of real understanding why. Some of the boys never even get sketched out in detail; three-quarters of the way through the film, I was still wondering who some of these guys were who popped up to talk to the main characters, and if they had been on the ship the entire time. Crucial scenes are skipped over entirely; in one scene, the ship is still in port, and the students are doing a lot of painting and spit polishing. In the next, they're in the middle of the ocean somewhere. When did they leave port? When did the boys actually learn to raise anchor?

The captain of the ship is played by Jeff Bridges, and is a tough old salt to the bones. Or so we must assume, since he talks gruffly and makes sure to state three or four times that he doesn't care whether the boys like him or not. In fact, I spent most of the movie wondering why he ran his school, since he didn't seem to much care about teaching the boys. He was around simply to glower, provide a plot-device father-figure for the ship, and identify the title character for us in an awed snarl when it showed up.

That character, an amazing freak seastorm never confirmed to exist by meteorologists, provides a good excuse for some wild special effects, with devastating and fatal consequences for the good ship Albatross and its crew. The boys must now decide whether to hang tough with the skipper, and how, when he's under investigation for the tragedy. Again, we never see any actual decision being made; we are just told that it was done and are taken along for the ride.

None of the characters made any sense to me. Some of the boys are given their quirks and some flimsy explanations for them, but they didn't really hold together. The movie didn't even do a good job of expressing the love of sea, of sailing, that the characters were all supposed to be bound by. The lessons the boys learn on the ship are passed over so shallowly that we don't understand how - or if - any of them are really growing. I can't think of a single person to recommend this movie to. There are a dozen other movies out there, from Dead Poets Society (I was almost expecting one of the boys to stand up in the climactic scene to yell out "O captain, my captain!") to Blackboard Jungle, that have covered this same territory and done it better. Hit the rental stores for a better alternative to this film.

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