POSEIDON
POSEIDON is the 2006 theatrical remake of the 1972 classic about an ocean liner that is capsized by a 90-foot tidal wave on New Year's Eve and the struggle for a handful of passengers to get to the bottom (top) of the boat before it sinks.
Irwin Allen's widow, Sheila is listed in the opening credits as Executive Producer, which surprised me because I cannot believe that she actually put her seal of approval on this. This re-thinking, as opposed to a remake, really only borrows the basic premise of the original. In '72 the Poseidon was an old barge on its last legs making what was supposed to be its final voyage. Here, the Poseidon is a state of the art ocean liner that appears to have something like seven or eight decks. The ship includes scenic elevators and there is a casino and a disco.
The opening shot of the movie where the camera sweeps around the ship is breathtaking, but director Wolfgang Petersen's obsession with getting to the sinking meant other sacrifices and the main one was too little exposition that didn't allow us time to care about these people before the ship turned over. We've barely been introduced to the characters when the tidal wave hits and as the journey to survival begins, we really don't care because the characters here don't even begin to resemble the characters in the original and it's hard to care about what happens to them.
Two of the few likable characters in the movie, a gambler named Lucky Larry, played by Kevin Dillon and a galley worker played by Freddy Rodriguez, are eliminated early on and the rest of the survivors are pretty intolerable. There is a mother and son played by Jacinda Barrett and Jimmy Bennet (Harrison Ford's son in FIREWALL)who you just want to strangle 20 minutes into the movie.
The movie features state of the art special effects, but after the ship turns over, it becomes completely devoid of interest because we don't learn enough about these characters to care about them the way we cared about Hackman's priest and Shelley Winters' little old lady swimming champ. The best thing about the movie is that it clocks in under 90 minutes.