Review of Poseidon (2006) by Markb. — 15 May 2006

This remake (although its stars claim it isn't one) is definitely not your father's Poseidon Adventure, which proves that sometimes father really does know best. Purists, of course, will find plenty to cavil about (Where's my Shelley Winters yakking about what a championship swimmer she was right before she drowns? Where's my Reverend Gene arguing with God just prior to meeting Him? Where's my Ernest Borgnine nagging my Stella Stevens to put on some clothes for a change? Where's my schlocky-but-catchy Maureen McGovern song that turned out to be so catchy, she virtually duplicated it two years later in The Towering Inferno?) but let's be honest: even if you're not a devotee of the original, there's STILL plenty to hate here.

Irwin Allen's 1972 version of Paul Gallico's novel was a relatively respectable early example of one of the most unlikable of major film genres, the disaster movie; the personal drames and cornball characters navigating their way through the wreckage of an ocean liner destroyed by a tidal wave are precisely as campy as some viewers think they are, but there's an equally plausible reason why some of the original's fans (past and present) take it all perfectly seriously: because the filmmakers did, too.

While "Master of Disaster" Allen no doubt handled most of the heavy lifting on the special effects, the actors were helmed by Ronald Neame, a dignified British director whose previous efforts (Tunes of Glory, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie) were character studies first and foremost; even though the 1972 Poseidon was dramatically several leagues inferior, there's no doubt that Neame brought a considerable level of utter conviction to his material.

The remake's director, Wolfgang Peterson, under the assumption that a summer movie audience is by definition unanimously stricken with A.D.D. and thus in a desperate hurry to get to the fires and explosions, gives us characters that are so half-dimensional (they don't even have enough depth to qualify as ONE-dimensional) that he makes the original's script look like a Eugene O'Neill play by comparison.

All the women (including Ladder 49's lovely Jacinda Barrett) look alike even BEFORE being covered in smoke and bilge, and all the men yell their way through the entire movie with the exception of Richard Dreyfuss, who as a heartbroken, suicidal architect strikes an inadvertent blow for gay equality by proving that homosexuals can be every bit as boring as straights.

What in the name of Neptune has happened to the once-great Peterson, anyway? Much of his previous work had what Poseidon stubbornly and willfully lacks: The Perfect Storm respected and honored its ill-fated real-life fishing crew while detailing the logistical mistakes they made that led to their tragedy, and in Air Force One Peterson took special care to tour us through the Presidential plane so that the action that subsequently took place in every compartment and chamber would really hit home.

Judging from this and Troy, Peterson (who also, of course, made the definitive underwater movie, Das Boot, with very few special effects) needs to have his shiny new CGI toys taken away from him: some of the effects and exteriors here look as phony and unconvincing here as the rear-projection shots of ANY movie made in 1945.

But what truly transports this Poseidon from being merely forgettably and disposably bad to being genuinely offensive is its graphic depictions of human pain, injury and agony and the utter callousness that both the film and its major characters display to the suffering of everyone else on the ship.

Remember that in the original, the walk-ons and extras who perished did so because they were offered the choice of following the principal players and declined it; they essentially sealed their own doom.

Here, the main characters don't even TRY to help anyone else, so perhaps it shouldn't be too surprising later on when someone responds to the life-or-death peril of a FAMILY MEMBER with all the emotion you'd expect from someone who temporarily misplaced a shopping list.

Although the original Poseidon Adventure was a fairly benign example of the form, I've always found disaster movies to be as reprehensible as the current spate of horror films in which a character spends 90 minutes or so torturing all the OTHER characters: both genres invite their audiences to stare and drool at human pain and tragedy, only in this case Mother Nature herself does the slicing and dicing.

Perhaps this Poseidon's already legendarily, uh, disastrous box office showing, coupled with the real-life United 93 making fictional accounts like this even more obscene by comparison will send any future incipient efforts to recycle Earthquake, The Towering Inferno and the Airports to a well-deserved watery grave.