Bottoms Up on the Poseidon

Poseidon

The New York Sun, May 12, 2006

I can't imagine it's much fun being a passenger stuck on a cruise liner that has just flipped upside down, but, according to Wolfgang Petersen, the director of "Poseidon," the sense of confinement makes it even worse. "This is not something a person can run away from. Trapped within a closed environment where there is no escape, no help, and very little time, they are forced to deal with it by themselves." Trust me, Wolfgang, any audience unfortunate or unwise enough to be trapped in a cinema watching this movie will know exactly how those passengers might feel. Well, perhaps not exactly. One of the problems with this film is not that there is too little time, but that there is too much: the last journey of the Poseidon is the most excruciatingly interminable sea voyage since that embarrassing garbage barge left New York all those years ago.

Perhaps we shouldn't be surprised. In "Troy" (2004), Mr. Petersen took an ancient and much loved story, stripped it of its presiding deities, and left moviegoers with dross, disappointment, and a vague sense of sacrilege. In "Poseidon," he's done it again. In filming his riff on legendary producer Irwin Allen's ("Lost in Space," "Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea," "The Towering Inferno," you name it) ancient and much loved "The Poseidon Adventure" (1972), he's stripped the story of Mike Rogo, Linda Rogo, Fallon from "Dynasty," Manny, fat Mrs. Rosen, the Reverend Scott, Nonnie, the annoying boy, and anyone else we might remember and replaced them with a cast of characters so insipid that I found myself rooting for the ocean so busily engulfing their vessel.

To be fair, an earlier, and more literal, remake of "The Poseidon Adventure," a made-for-TV shipwreck from 2005, did no better. Memorable only for the appearance of a startlingly hangdog Steve Guttenberg (evidently still traumatized by "Police Academy 4") and the remarkable restraint of scriptwriters who, despite their obvious desperation, contented themselves with only adding terrorism, adultery, and the Department of Homeland Security to the volatile mix aboard the Poseidon, the film was a fiasco, both in its own right and when compared with the first "Poseidon," which was still seaworthy, if sunk, after more than three decades.

Taking on Allen's old rust bucket was never going to be easy, as even Allen discovered when he tried in 1979's the lesss-aid-about-it-the-better "Beyond the Poseidon Adventure." His original movie may have been schlock, but it was schlock made with a verve and madcap enthusiasm that hasn't been easy to match. It wasn't the first of the disaster movies - essential escapism in an unsettling age - that helped define American cinema in that era (that honor should be reserved for "Airport") but it was the greatest, and it is the one that resonates most today. There's even (God help us) a fan club, complete with reunions, a Web site, and in the venerable figure of the nonagenarian Ronald Neame, the film's director, its own private Roddenberry.

Of course, some of its appeal is purely nostalgic, and the passing of the years has also helped transform the film's fashion tragedies, rococo death scenes, and soap opera melodramatics into a wickedly camp treat, but there's something more to it than that. With the exception of its capsized concept, Paul Gallico's "The Poseidon Adventure," the novel on which Neame's movie was based, was a feeble, sour creation: the only thing worse than the writing was the unwieldy religious allegory that came with it. The film benefited by being a good deal cheerier, taking itself far less seriously, and confining the scripture lesson to the Reverend Scott's uncomplicatedly noble, useful, and entertaining death: a Passion, in fact, with a touch of "MacGyver" about it.

For a film set on a cruise liner, it was also an oddly egalitarian movie, something that still plays well in the country that once belonged to Frank Capra. The Poseidon, like its passengers, had known better days; its glitz was all paste. The stiffs that littered the shattered Grand Ballroom had been regular working stiffs, and so were a good number of the people clambering and scrambling up to the top of the ship's bottom to survive: the cop, the retired hardware store owner, the haberdasher, all of them showing the wear and tear of a more hardscrabble past. The ship's hierarchy proves largely useless in the crisis: it's left to Scott's team of grumbling schlubs to do the right thing. And so they do. In short, the movie is a display of Americana at its most madly, endearingly self-confident, even down to the malign, greedy presence of Linarcos: rich man, jerk, foreigner.

The arrival of Mr. Petersen at the helm of "Poseidon" signals a different approach and, so to speak, a clean deck. The old girl has been transformed into a luxury liner, with passengers to match. Even the plucky band of survivors appears to be culled on snobbish lines (I don't want to spoil what plot there is, but this is not a movie in which you want to play a waiter). At least, the wave (banished from the Gutenberg edition) is back and it's suitably spectacular, as are the repeated images of water, snaking, bubbling, and surging its way through the ship in what appears to be an almost conscious pursuit of its prey. If nothing else, Mr. Petersen (the director of "Das Boot" and "The Perfect Storm") can do H2O.

But his screenwriters can't do dialogue. The game old stagers of the original movie would have compensated for this with an extra portion of ham, but, with the exceptions of stolid Kurt Russell - former fireman, ex-mayor, protective dad of the pretty Jennifer (Emmy Rossum) - and a wonderfully anarchic Kevin Dillon - pencil moustache, drunk - most of the cast is left, like their vessel, hopelessly, helplessly adrift. The only remaining excitement involves the front of Jennifer's dress, which, for a few glorious moments, manages to evoke fond memories of the nail-biting suspense provided by Stella Stevens's plunging decolletage in the first "Poseidon." As for Jennifer herself, she's a pre-Raphaelite delight of pale beauty and dark curls, doomed, I suspect, to die of TB in countless period dramas.

After this film, however, that will seem like a merciful release.