popular thinking

RETHINKING POSEIDON

Like many folks, I count myself as a fan of the 1970s disaster flick, The Poseidon Adventure. Check out this tribute site. Then check out the new version, simply titled Poseidon, and you'll quickly see that just about everything but the basic plot has undergone an extreme makeover. For one thing, the only potential escapee who makes it into both plots is the curious little boy. Everyone else gets younger and more photogenic. Where is the Shelley Winters, the Ernest Borgnine, the Jack Albertson? Gone, gone, gone. Sure, Emmy Rossum, Jacinda (we still remember you from the Real World!) Barrett and Mia Maestro are good-looking and all, but even so, this script doesn't give us too many reasons to care about their survival. Same goes for the rest of the new crew. Richard Dreyfuss is supposedly to be a gay guy who just got dumped, but why are we supposed to know that later? No reason. Director Wolfgang Petersen used the same CGI giant wave technology he previously employed in The Perfect Storm.

And according to my interviews with real-life scientists and people associated with cruise ships, it'd take a perfect storm to even produce the kind of "rogue wave" that could damage a ship.

Read my story on the "reality" of a Poseidon adventure here.

But if you really want to see this Poseidon, know this: Essentially, the disaster movie has taken most of its pages straight out of the horror movie genre's playbook. Deaths are more gruesomely depicted and telegraphed, to the point in one case in which the audience actually cheers one character's demise. Other deaths happen and are quickly forgotten. Why bother mourning? We've got escaping to do.

So my prediction is...it'll do big business opening weekend, but really, like M:I:III before it, Poseidon will get capsized by The Da Vinci Code. That's the movie people really are waiting to see (despite any buzz you've heard or read about the return of many of your favorite superheroes).