10 Movies Based On True Stories (That Were Total Lies)

5. The Perfect Storm

Nobody really talks about The Perfect Storm anymore, almost as if it wasn't very good or something. The movie, which starred George Clooney, Mark Wahlberg, Diane Lane, and John C. Reilly, tells the "true story" of the crew of the Andrea Gail, a fishing boat that got caught in a massive storm in 1991, nicknamed "the Perfect Storm," and never returned.

The names of the real life people who died were used for the characters in the film, as if the Hollywood filmmakers were saying: "This is so legitimate that we're gonna even use the real freakin' names!" In the movie, then, down on his luck and financially impaired Billy Tyne (that's Clooney) convinces a ragtag crew to join him on a fishing trip, until they eventually come into contact with the "Perfect Storm" of the title. It doesn't end well.

A relatively simple story, of course, and one where you expect a little creative license, given that all the people who were involved were killed. The problem is that this "true story" is actually made up of tons of different "true stories" collected in the book of the same name by Sebastian Junger. The only thing the movie actually depicts about the Andrea Gail that is definitely true, however, is the fact that it went out to sea and didn't come back - almost all of the "incidents" that are depicted in the picture happened to other fisherman entirely. Um...