Movie #13 - Poseidon

Well... to mark the first day of having The Movie Network (TMN) channels on our cable system at home, I decided to start myself off on the right foot and watch the remake of The Poseidon Adventure, entitled Poseidon.

There isn't much to this film. The cruise ship is CGI built and the set, although elaborate, is really a bunch of stages in a warehouse. Even some of the major set builds seem fake and you really have to pay attention to what could be real and what's obviously not.

Josh Lucas and Kurt Russell star in this film with some useless appearances from the likes of Emmy Rossum and Richard Dreyfuss. There is also a surprising appearance by Fergie (Stacy Ferguson) of Black Eyed Peas fame and Andre Braugher from Homicide: Life on the Street.

The film attempts to build some characters early on in the film, but spends just about 10 minutes on this attempt. Unlike the first Poseidon starring Hackman and company, this movie wastes no time in destroying the ship with the rogue tidal wave, but also wastes no time to pit the band of survivors against pitfall after pitfall of danger.

I guess Wolfgang Petersen's (Das Boot, Air Force One, Outbreak, In the Line of Fire) thought that if he just bombarded the audience with scene after scene of suspense, that the final picture would be well worth the time spent. Well... I thought the original Poseidon Adventure was a bore, due to its attempts to build characters and discuss courses of action in a time of crisis. However, this film just threw all of that out of the window and decided to just do a plain action film... which sank at the end.

Both movies have their positives... I guess in retrospect, the first one had bigger actors for one (Hackman, Borgnine, Winters) and even garnered some Academy attention. This one... was just a fumble from the beginning. It probably relied on the success of the first film in order to parlay that into success in a remake.

Overall, in my movie watching lifetime... I haven't seen a movie remake better than the first one... and trust me, there have been plenty that have bombed. This one can rank up there with the rest of them.

There is only one cool scene here... but in a time of despair and destruction, its doubtful that this scene would even happen in "real" life. However, it was still a cool one and was the only surprise of the movie. Bonus: Fergie dies... guess the whole film wasn't that bad!

Movie #7 - The Day After Tomorrow

The Day After Tomorrow is a Hollywood blockbuster that addresses a current topic of interest globally in a trivial way. Current issues that have plagued the globe in terms of climate change, pollution, resource use, etc. have been accelerated in this movie to show what life would be like after another ice age. Technology aside, it takes the work of one man - Dennis Quaid, to save the world.

This is very typical since there are thousands of scientists globally who have been saying this for years already... yet in one major swoop, one man knows that the doom of the world is eminent.

There are side plots to this movie with a cast that includes Jake Gyllenhal, Emmy Rossum, Sela Ward, and Ian Holm. Too bad none of them made any real difference in this movie. The majority of the side cast outside of these actors consisted of recognizable Tier 2 Canadian actors. This movie was obviously filmed in Hollywood North, made to look like New York city. Although CGI allows for this, casting Canadian actors in prominent roles like the VP of the U.S. made this movie more enjoyable as a Canadian movie fan.

Anyhow... this movie does have some cool scenes. The mass exodus of the seagulls and birds out of New York city was quite cool. Made a lot of sense knowing that the animals would've been the first to know that trouble is brewing in nature. I could've enjoyed this movie more without the CGI wolves attacking the cast in a marooned Russian ship. Scenes like this really didn't make a great deal of sense since they are escapees from the zoo and suddenly went rabid and crazy for not being fed for a couple of hours - doubtful.

There was some dramatic scenes and some areas in which people died unnecessarily. However, the major dramatic scene that I found quite comical was the cast trying to escape the looming cold front of death... something that just didn't seem right. Good product placement for Wendy's though... saved Quaid's life from this blast of cold air.

Anyhow... overall, this is just one of those Roland Emmerich movies that you can live without seeing... although all of his movies are in that category.