A Fool's Gesture

First, I want to wish Sarah from Finishing the Hat a very HAPPY BIRTHDAY! I was fortunate enough to have met Sarah when I was in Manhattan last September. She's extremely sweet and fun to be around, so go over and say hi. She just moved from Hell's Kitchen (I love that name) to a new pad in the Upper East Side.

Poseidon: B+

I respect a movie far more when it doesn’t try to be more than it really is. It knows it can’t excel in every facet of the film, so it concentrates its efforts on a few key attributes to really impress you.

Serving as this summer’s major disaster flick, Poseidon turns any person’s fear of the ocean into a reality with a 150 foot rogue wave that literally consumes this monstrosity ship as a snack. The boat turns over and comes to a rest upside down, after which time, a group of survivors decide not to test the fortitude of the ballroom walls and attempt to make their way up to the bottom, I mean, top level of the ship.

Poseidon is a quasi-remake of The Poseidon Adventure that came out in 1972 starring Gene Hackman among other then-celebs, Shelley Winters, Red Buttons, Ernest Borgnine, etc. Though the stars and filmmakers of the latest version have stated that the only commonality is the boat over-turning, but they are probably half-right, as there are only so many different problems that one can encounter on this type of adventure. There is definitely a feeling of familiarity with the film, though not to the point where any of the new surprises are spoiled.

One of the best reasons to wait 30 years to do a remake is that the stunts and technology have exponentially evolved since the last version. The effects are fantastic, with special attention paid to the initial catastrophe where the audience can’t help but feel trapped alongside the actors. And for a nice change, it’s interesting to watch a disaster film that doesn’t focus upon obliterating New York City and the Statue of Liberty.

I applaud the studio for using B-list (a.k.a. “wasn’t she in….”) or veteran actors (Kurt Russell and Richard Dreyfuss) that have already peaked in their careers. The main characters in this film are the ship and the ocean, and anyone else is really just a pawn in this game of survival. This isn’t a well-written script and the human characters are not even remotely developed, but quite frankly, we don’t care. Anyone could play these roles because we’re there to see the effects, the stunts, and have our heart almost go into defibrillation. And the film succeeds in that respect.

Studios are starting to realize that films don’t need an A-list star that commands $20+million per picture, which causes the product costs to increase, and ultimately, the movie-goers are the ones that pay the price. What exacerbates this cycle is that these expensive stars aren’t always a guarantee box office draw or profit-maker – just ask the producers that paid Nicole Kidman $15 million for The Stepford Wives. As I write this, the previous weekend’s tallies announced that Mission: Impossible III outperformed Poseidon, but in reality, once Cruise’s back-end bloated salary is factored out, Poseidon will most likely still come out ahead.

Though this movie is PG-13, there are quite a few corpses that are shown throughout the film and they aren’t as “pretty” as the hypothermic ones from Titanic. These people have been charred, impaled and crushed, so you may want to factor that in when deciding whether or not to take kids to see this (though you don’t actually see most of the injuries occur).

There are still a few glitches that I seem to find with any movie that I have to vent about for just a moment, like how someone in the control room can “just feel that something’s not right” when neither the multi-million dollar equipment nor the man standing outside with binoculars can detect the 150 foot wave. Or, how these various compartments with corpses fill up with water, and yet there is no blood to taint it? Having grown up around the ocean, I wish that I could have opened my eyes for long periods of time in salt water and not have them sting nor cause me to rub them incessantly after I re-emerged.

Poseidon is worth seeing in the theatres in order to capture all of the events on a grand scale. An hour and 38 minutes will never pass by so quickly. Now, if only work could be this exciting.