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!