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Don’t see Poseidon if you plan on
spending time on a holiday cruise ship
this summer. That would be like
watching United 93 just
before your next flight. Both films
underscore the horror of being a
captured audience when things go very
bad.
Like most disaster flicks, Poseidon
begins serenely as Director Wolfgang
Peterson (Das Boot) takes
the camera and makes a 360-degree pan of
the stunningly beautiful open sea
surrounding the majestic and solitary
ship.
What follows, before the big splash, is
a 20-minute exercise in character
development. This is the part of the
film where you get to know a little
something about the group that survives
the initial dunking and begin making
those unconscious decisions of who you
like and don’t like.
That’s important because the only guilty
pleasure in watching a ship going down
is guessing which passengers will make
it. Unfortunately, the personality
sketches are thin at best, and the
downside of inadequate character
development is that audiences don’t feel
much regret over those who do die.
It’s New Year's Eve on the North
Atlantic and everyone is partying in the
main ballroom. Professional gambler
Dylan Johns (Josh Lucas) is playing
poker with the former mayor of New York
(Kurt Russell) and a poster boy for
sexism and bad suits (Kevin Dillon).
Later, all three of these guys gamble
that the odds of surviving a capsized
ship are better if you climb to the
bottom.
Other characters that surface in
Poseidon include a suicidal gay man
(Richard Dreyfuss looking very old), an
illegal alien (Mia Maestro), a cook on
the ship (Freddy Rodriguez), the mayor's
self-centered daughter and her whining
boyfriend and a mother and her young
son. Oddly enough, the two most likable
and selfless characters are Latino
(Maestro and Rodriguez), and they are
unceremoniously purged from the group in
this script.
At the stroke of midnight a 150-foot
“rouge wave” (where did they get that
expression?) smashes into the luxury
liner and sends it topsy-turvy, causing
the deaths of hundreds in a slow-motion,
tension-filled sequence that includes
explosions, fireballs, electrocutions,
elevators jettisoning passengers and a
swimming pool emptying its contents.
Shortly after the mayhem, gambler Thomas
decides to leave the safety of the
ballroom and climb up to the bottom of
the boat. He is soon accompanied by the
motley cast of characters identified
earlier in the film as they make their
perilous journey through the bowels of
the ship.
Death and danger lie around every
corner. The short 90-minute duration of
this film is tightly packed with
nail-biting suspense and
hold-your-breath anxiety. Warner
Brothers chose the right person to
direct this thriller.
Peterson knows a thing or two about
tight quarters on the high seas. If you
saw his film Das Boot, you
may recall those claustrophobic scenes
in the German submarine that made your
skin crawl just imagining what it would
be like trapped in that tin can deep
underwater.
Peterson creates a similar scene in
Poseidon by herding the surviving
passengers into the ship's duct system
while water within the narrow vertical
shaft steadily rises up their legs as
they struggle to ascend to the next
level.
In more ways than one, the duct-shaft
scene was the high-water mark in
Poseidon. There is one other memorable
drowning scene involving one of the
stars of the film that was a surprise
and made me queasy.
However, the balance of the film is
predictable and the brief, tense thrill
ride is soon over. The unremarkable
characters are soon forgotten. What I do
remember after seeing Poseidon
was checking my watch while timing how
long I could hold my breath (about 45
seconds). I probably wouldn’t have made
it. |
