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Poseidon, a remake of the 1972 classic The Poseidon Adventure, shows man’s helplessness against the wrath of nature, writes Ervell E. Menezes
SO we have a new Poseidon, after three decades. No The Poseidon Adventure – 2 or The Early Poseidon or any such thing. Just Poseidon, or to be more accurate an Instant Poseidon, a normal length film; not those overlong blockbusters of the early 1970s which marked the advent of the three disaster movie biggies The Poseidon Adventure, The Towering Inferno and Earthquake. Sadly the last named never made it to India because Paramount (the distributors) were waiting for Sensaround equipment to be installed in cinemas. Now German director Wolfgang Petersen of The Never Ending Story fame has been commissioned to do this more concise version of the original adventure in which the Sea god decides to swallow a big modern shipping miracle as it does periodically (remember Titanic?) for entertainment and to show man’s helplessness against the wrath of nature. It’s a glitzy beginning and if you are a bit late you’ll miss Stacy Ferguson’s song at the New Year Ball (like if you came a bit late in the 1940s you’d miss the heavyweight boxing fight because Brown Bomber Joe Louis knocked out Billy Corn in the first round). So the fun and gaiety turn to instant disaster but the spectacle of the cruise liner gliding in the night is a sight for sore eyes. Sadly, what follows isn’t. Whereas in the original we had Gene Hackman and a plethora of big stars (Ernest Borgnine, Red Buttons, Carol Lynley, Shelley Winters and company)—and these disparate characters were well etched so that they made their impact on the developing story. The cast here is headed by an inveterate gambler Dylan Johns (Josh Lucas) and he does his best to keep the film going, but against overpowering odds. There’s an ex-New York Mayor Robert Ramsey (Kurt Russell), his daughter Jennifer (Emma Rossum) and her fianc`E9 and an elderly businessman Richard Nelson (Richard Dreyfuss). From then on this small group tries to find its way to safety (no sub-plots) and the fare gets rather repetitive. Periodically you get some boiler bursting or some opening through which seawater gushes in, but only a few seconds after our group gets past that spot. With the result you have a small beginning, a huge big middle and a wee predictable end. In fact the film is all middle. The romance between the two youngsters is the only angle worth developing but even that isn’t done justice to. The father-daughter relationship has scope for development but is quite wishy-washy. The mother-son cameos are at best tolerable. This Posiedon misses out on narrative. Visuals are not good enough (however superb the special effects are), if a narrative strewn with action and suspense does not match them. It is its biggest letdown. So all that glamour-glitz comes close to naught without the accompanying human drama. Josh Lucas, of course, does his best to overcome these glitches and Kurt Russell is to the film what Roddy McDowell was to the original but Richard Dreyfuss does precious little apart from ageing amazingly and the others are merely academic, just cogs in this immense Hollywood disaster wheel. So in sum, Poseidon falls between two stools. See it at your own peril and only if you do not have anything better to do.
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