Starring: Josh Lucas, Kurt Russell and Richard Dreyfuss
Director: Wolfgang Petersen
Rated: M
SOME will remember The Poseidon Adventure, the original film on which Poseidon is based.
The Poseidon Adventure spawned the “disaster movie”.
There are significant changes from the 1972 film. This boat is not on its final voyage. It is a state-of-the-art cruise liner.
The main characters are smaller in number, and their back stories are different as well.
But the basic premise of both movies is exactly the same.
On New Year’s Eve, a luxury ship is rolled over by a freak tidal wave. Most of passengers stay with the captain in the ballroom and die.
Robert Ramsay (Kurt Russell) and Dylan Johns (Josh Lucas) lead a motley group up through the upended liner, in search of salvation. They encounter many obstacles.
Poseidon will drive engineers and meteorologists crazy.
But never mind the facts and details, and don’t go looking for a story that even remotely has any character development or narrative arc.
Disaster films are all about, well, surviving the disaster.
Thirty-four years after the original, what has improved is the special effects, computer-generated images and cinematography now available to the director.
And this is why Wolfgang Petersen’s Poseidon may be worth the admission price. The production director, set designers, director of photography, set dresses and stunt men and women are the real stars of this film.
Klaus Badelt’s music score is also appropriately sweeping and tight in good measure.
There are loads of continuity mistakes, leaps of logic and inconsistencies, not least how our climbing team can breathe underwater for so long.
But this movie has enough tense moments and shocks to sustain our interest for a commendably economical 99 minutes.
There are two changes that I don’t get.
Why did they maroon Shelley Winters’ Olympic swimming character? Her death scene was one of the best things in the 1972 film.
And where is “There’s Got to be a Morning After”? That may have got a whole new generation weeping at the end, and given P&O a new jingle.
