Poseidon

Rating: **1/2

Of all the boats in movie history the only one that's probably had worse luck than the S.S. Poseidon is the H.M.S. Titanic. All-in-all, there have been three filmed versions of Paul Gallico's book about a capsized luxury liner and the small group of survivors trying to escape certain death. The first was 1972's The Poseidon Adventure, which launched a decade long Hollywood obsession with disaster pictures; then, last fall, there was the similarly titled TV movie that turned the disaster from a tsunami to a terrorist bomb. Now we have Wolfgang Peterson, the modern master of water-born disasters, taking his shot at the Poseidon to mixed results.

Like Ronald Neame's original, Poseidon is an all-star affair with Josh Lucas, Kurt Russell, Richard Dreyfuss, Andre Braugher, Emmy Rossum, Mia Mastero, Kevin Dillon and Freddie Rodriguez. Unlike the titular boat of the original this Poseidon is state of the art, and on New Year's Eve a huge tidal wave capsizes the ship, leaving a handful of survivors in the ship's ballroom. Although the Captain recommends that everyone remain in the ballroom till help arrives, a few hotheads, including many members of the cast list above, decide to climb through the bowels of the ship to get to freedom.

The film clocks in at about 100 minutes, so it's a quick clip as you watch the characters hurtle one disaster after another. On this count, and this count alone, the film works; it has wonderful set pieces and death traps that occasionally gets the heart racing. These sequences would matter more though if we cared about the characters, that is if the vast majority of them weren't self-centred winers.

In Neame's Poseidon, tension was built up for the first quarter of the film; we got know the characters, where they came from, where they're going, and a little bit about who they are. In Peterson's film, he doesn't waste time with pleasantries, everything we need to know about a character and their conflict is summed up in one sentence throwaway lines like: "Do you miss being Mayor?" or "have you told your father yet?"

Any added suspense is removed due to the fact that as soon as the ship tips over and the survivors begin their journey to the top of the boat, it's pretty much written all over the screen who lives and who dies. There's no shock value, no "Holy Crap, I can't believe they killed HIM!" moment. There are three types of characters in Poseidon, there are the ones who serve a purpose, those who sacrifice themselves for loved ones and those that need to be saved constantly.

There's never really any "Shelly Winters moment", like in the original Poseidon where Winters' character, an over-weight grandmother that the other survivors have had to carry through the film, rescues a fellow survivor while clearing the way for the others to reach safety. There's no frustration or even grim determination in the survivors of the remake, they're just going through the motions.

There's a scene in the original where Gene Hackman's character Reverend Scott, the defacto leader of the survivors, lashes out at God as they face one last obstacle to their freedom. He hangs from a steam valve, yelling to the high heavens that no one else will die, and if God demands a sacrifice then He should take him. There really is no heroism in Poseidon, there's even a scene where one character literally sacrifices another for his own survival.

In the remake, Scott is split into two characters Lucas' Dylan and Russell's Ramsey. It sort of undermines the suspense when you have two main characters, it means that almost certainly one will be sacrificed, not that it matters because the entire situation seems another day at the office for both men. At least Hackman had the appearance of a man under pressure.

I'll say this for Poseidon, it's a decently executed, well-built popcorn movie that will, if nothing else, will give you a good time. The only real reason to remake The Poseidon Adventure is to take advantage of modern special effects, we see the wave hit the boat from the insider out, we can watch the ship capsize from every angle and you can see debris and bodies float under the submerged deck of the boat. It all looks cool at least.

If you want to see Poseidon, then I recommend seeing it on the big screen so that you can take in the film in all it's glory. I fear that the cracks in the film will really show through on home video.