Lana Whited at Roanoke.Com

What would it be like to drown at sea?

It might seem perverse, but moviegoers are rushing out in droves to see the experience simulated in the summer blockbuster film "The Perfect Storm." The fact that former "ER" star George Clooney plays the doomed skipper even has women flocking to see a film which centers around a guy thing: deep sea fishing.

But there's a problem with the latest offering from Wolfgang Petersen, the action-film director who gave us the presidential pics "In the Line of Fire" and "Air Force One" and the undersea thriller "Das Boot" ("The Boat"). Petersen's film dramatizes an event that's hollow at the center -- a tragedy in a vacuum. After the last radio transmission from the fishing boat Andrea Gail about 6 p.m. on Oct. 28, 1991, no one knows what happened to the six crewmen. Fuel drums were found floating in the North Atlantic a few days later, but no bodies ever surfaced. Petersen dramatizes the crew's final hours anyway, because "The Perfect Storm" is a movie, and he can't just leave a major star adrift on the ocean with no resolution.

By contrast, Sebastian Junger, whose New York Times best-selling book by the same title is the film's source, drops the Andrea Gail where it disappeared, with that last radio call.

The difference in Petersen's and Junger's approaches reveals a lot about both movie-making and writing nonfiction. It also can help us understand something about the nature of tragedy.

Writing a nonfiction book about a catastrophe is a tricky undertaking if there are no witnesses. Jon Krakauer, whose book "Into Thin Air" dramatizes "the deadliest season in the history of [climbing Mount] Everest," had the distinct advantage of having been along on the trek he narrates. He knows what happened because (the effects of high-altitude delirium notwithstanding) he was there.

Junger had no such -- well, we can't say "luck," can we? Perspective, then. In the absence of information at the core of his story, he takes the only route open to the nonfiction writer who wants his book cover stamped with "a true story" -- he goes only as far as the facts will allow.

This is not to suggest that Junger doesn't speculate. In fact, much of his account is based on speculation, as he makes clear in his foreword: "In the end I wound up sticking strictly to the facts, but in as wide-ranging a way as possible. If I didn't know exactly what happened aboard the doomed boat, for example, I would interview people who had been through similar situations, and survived. Their experiences, I felt, would provide a fairly good description of what the six men on the Andrea Gail had gone through, and said, and perhaps even felt."

Junger's use of parallel stories and similar ships is his book's strength and its weakness. It is certainly reasonable to assume that by reading about the experiences of fishermen (and women) caught in other big storms at sea, a reader could make a guess about the fate of the Andrea Gail. And Junger gives exciting accounts of two rescues: two women and a man aboard the Satori, bound for the Bahamas, and the crew of an Air National Guard rescue helicopter which ditched in high seas southeast of Long Island. (Both are dramatized in the film.) Junger's refusal to move outside the bounds of facts he can corroborate with survivors and his habit of clearly marking his "maybes" is admirable and gives his account a journalistic quality.

Some readers or viewers, however, feel cheated at cutting away from the Andrea Gail to other sailors in peril. A story -- book, film, or whatever genre -- asks us to focus our attention on main characters. In "The Perfect Storm," we follow six men out to sea, focusing even within the 72-foot boat on two: the skipper, Billy Tyne, and a rookie, Bobby Shatford (played on screen by Mark Wahlberg). If Junger's method is honest, it also leads us to the edge of a cliff-- our captain issues a final radio warning to the whole swordfishing fleet, "She's comin' on boys, and she's comin' on strong," and disappears. There's probably no bigger problem for a writer than characters who disappear before the climax.

Moviegoers will probably find Petersen's approach much more satisfying. Junger's speculation about the last few hours in the lives of Tyne and crew are dramatized and amplified, right down to the last moment. It may be pure speculation, but it's perfectly played by Wahlberg and Clooney. Because we stay with the doomed men almost to the very end, we ride out the wave of the narrative line through rising action, climax, and denouement and leave the theatre with a greater sense of finality.

The special effects in the film are terrific, too: dark, malevolent waves the height of skyscrapers towering over a boat so dwarfed that it occasionally looks like what it actually was, a model in a water tank. Add the racing score and you have the very experience that summer movies are famous for. Waiting for the film to start, I thought of that summer long ago when my friend Kelley and I stood in a long line to catch the first feature of "Jaws." If it's the ride you're after, you won't be disappointed.

At the same time, Petersen's film is limited by its dramatic nature. A drama must chart a narrative course, rising and falling with viewers' expectations. Should it spend too much time in a wave of detail, it could swamp. Junger can devote pages to a lengthy explanation of which areas of The Grand Banks are safer for maneuvering in a hurricane than others. If a film gives it more than a passing reference, it stalls in the water. Junger says he "didn't want the narrative to asphyxiate under a mass of technical detail and conjecture." He strikes a balance somewhere between the whaling chapters of "Moby-Dick" and Petersen's film. For that reason, a reader of Junger's book will understand some of the developments in the rapid storm sequences that may puzzle other filmgoers. Why is George Clooney climbing the outrigger in the middle of a hurricane? Besides the fact that it's hair-raising, he's attempting to untangle the weights or "birds" which stabilize the boat. Despite the tendency to "read more about it" -- get interested in a story from a television or film drama and then go in search of a book, I think it's a better idea to read the book first. There's no breach of secrecy, as we don't go to a film like "The Perfect Storm" to find out what happens in the end. A movie version of any event tends to show us only the tip of the iceberg. The tip itself may be an amazing specimen, but knowing what's underneath can amplify our appreciation of it.

There's a big vacuum at the heart of "The Perfect Storm," a vortex of uncertainty and fear. It's a compelling story because it mimics an empty space in humanity -- the place where we would understand what happens when a person faces his or her mortality. Some attempt to fill that space with religious belief. Others satisfy their curiosity by pouring information into the vacuum -- trying to understand an event like the Andrea Gail's disappearance or the account of a murder victim's last hours. We're drawn to know about and witness -- albeit vicariously -- the moment when other people, real or fictional, face their own peril, because we hope that knowledge may help us understand the mortality that most preoccupies us -- our own.

The (Im)Perfect Storm