Poseidon (2006)

It has been a little while since I last covered a disaster movie, if we're counting Airline Disaster as a disaster movie... It isn't really, although I did enjoy it, but I guess the last "genuine" disaster movie I covered was 2012 back in January and you know what, I never did get round to watching Moonfall... But I do have something of a soft spot for these kinda films. They are low maintenance, low attention span, comfort kinda movies. You don't have to think alot. And sometimes I just want that. So this evening, I'm turning my attention to Poseidon; a remake of the 1972 film; The Poseidon Adventure and third cinematic adaption of the 1969 novel; The Poseidon Adventure. I am... sensing a bit of a pattern here. For what it's worth I haven't seen the 1972 version so I am going into this with a completely open mind, no preconceptions, no mental comparisons with the original. I am a blank canvas. 

After a very impressive flyover of a CGI cruise ship, we are introduced to the various characters that are going to die in this movie... we have an incredibly normal looking Kurt Russell playing Robert Ramsey (Kurt Russell), his daughter Jennifer (Emmy Rossum) and her boyfriend Christian Sanders (Mike Vogel) who gets cock blocked when dad walks in on them... Dylan J. Johns (Josh Lucas) bumps into Elena Morales (Mia Maestro) who seemingly doesn't know her way around the cruise ship... and has likely been smuggled onboard by waiter Marco Valentin (Freddy Rodriguez)... Richard Nelson (Richard Dreyfuss) making an awkward phone call... the Police Chief from Brooklyn Nine-Nine masquerading as Captain Michael Bradford (Andre Braugher) and Fergie from the Black Eyed Peas who is calling her self Gloria here for some reason... at the poker table we find Dylan gambling with Robert and Johnny Drama from Entourage when after Robert's game gets blown by his daughter, still mad at him for being a controlling bellend, Dylan fleeces him for everything he has but then proceeds to bump into small lad Conor (Jimmy Bennett) and his mom Maggie James (Jacinda Bennett) so like y'know, I hope you're ok with following nearly 8 odd different characters development. As the New Year's festivities begin to get underway we learn that Richard's - I think - boyfriend has left him? Richard quickly taking the lead as the most interesting character in this thing which is admirable considering there are about 9 other contenders... and at the stroke of midnight when he doesn't get the phone call he is expecting he is visibly upset. Meanwhile inside the helm of the ship, absolute complete panic breaks out when the crew discover an enormous tidal wave on the horizon heading quickly in their direction, and rather than conduct an orderly and controlled evacuation to safe quarters, the crew decide instead to just invoke complete chaos, causing mass panic and hysteria amongst the passengers pretty much immediately with their announcements. Not that it matters much though as within moments the vessel is sideswiped by the wave and forced into a barrel roll capsizing as it does with complete chaos and destruction happening inside as the vessel rolls in the wave. As the survivors begin to emerge from the chaos, Robert and Maggie couple up with Robert helping Maggie reunite with Conor. Elena and Jennifer couple up with them both helping to try and free her trapped boyfriend Christian. In the main ballroom, Captain Bradford tries to appeal for calm from the surviving passengers but Robert, despite being a Fireman and despite understanding disaster scenarios better than anybody else declares he won't stay put in the ballroom until he finds his daughter and by coincidence of fate; Dylan, Robert, Richard, Maggie and Connor and Marco all find themselves banded together with one common goal: find a way out of the ship! Making their way into the kitchens the gang attempts to move further up (or down...!) the ship by crossing a lift shaft but along the way lose Marco when he isn't able to make it fully across and plummets to his death. Inside the nightclub, Johnny Drama, who is actually Lucky Larry (- and a great actor: Kevin Dillion) is seemingly one of the few survivors aside from Elena and the couple and helps them free Christian from being trapped before the four are united with Robert and the other team who find their way into the ballroom. As they move on to the next room and begin to cross the waterlogged atrium, we learn that Dylan previously served in the Navy, Robert served a term as Mayor of New York and that Elena was smuggled on board in order to get to New York, and Richard - still the most interesting character so far - is pretty much confirmed as gay which, to be honest, just makes him more interesting to me. As they begin to cross the atrium half the gang makes it to the other side when an engine collapses through the ceiling destroying the makeshift bridge and taking Lucky Larry with it (ah man!) leaving Dylan, Robert and Jennifer separated from the others but using a fire hose, Dylan turns into an action hero and devises a makeshift zipwire in order to create a way for them to get across. Inside the ballroom an increase in water pressure causes the windows to finally cave in flooding the entire room and obliterating everything and everyone inside and as the gang hear the screams echoing throughout the ship they endeavour to press on quickly with them ultimately settling on escaping through the air vents to avoid the rising water level. As they make their way to the top, the vents begin to flush with water, and with Elena freaking out the others have to calm her down in order to make it to the top, and working together they are just able to free the vent in time to escape before the ducting is completely flooded. Making their way through the ballast tanks and through flooded sections of the ship, Richard and Elena run into trouble when Elena snags her dress underwater and in a flap knocks herself out. Heading back for her Richard manages to drag her from the water into drier land, but the others are unable to revive her and have to move on, leaving her behind. As the ship begins to take on more water and the bulkheads begin to flood, the team discover a mechanic's diagram of the ship which determines their best means of escape is through the propeller tube but before they can get anywhere close the team discovers the route there is too heavily flooded, with Dylan shellshocked and for the first time stuck without a suggestion on how to escape. As the team split up to try and find a second escape route, the ship is rocked by a series of explosions and depressurisations, causing the gangway to flash flood with water, sweeping Maggie off her feet and washing her further down the vessel. With a way now clear, the gang splits up with Robert leading the others further up and Dylan retreating further down to find Maggie and Conor. As Dylan manages to find Maggie pretty quickly and the pair head further inside searching for Conor, the others find the propeller tube but discover the engines are still running, when Richard tries to open the hatch and is completely K.O'd when the air pressure forces it open in his face. As the engine room begins to flood, Robert works out that they need to swim further down to get to the control panel and shut off the engines, but the trip is too far for one person to make. Determining that Christian is the better suited person to do it, Jennifer is distraught and as Christian is saying his goodbyes, Robert takes the plunge instead working his way through to the control panel but after struggling to find the controls he begins to struggle for air and in his dying, drowning moments flicks the switch to reverse the engines before succumbing to the water. Meanwhile Maggie and Dylan locate Conor but are unable to set him free from a trap behind an ventilation grate and as the lower decks become fully submersed, Maggie fears the worst only for a gasping Dylan to finally emerge with Conor in his arms. Reuniting with the others, the team learn that Robert has reversed the engines when they fire up and begin sucking in debris through the hatch. Forcing a gas cylinder into the hatch, Dylan blows out the engines just in the nick of time as the deck begins to take on water and making their way through the propeller tube the team make it out of the boat and into the open air for the first time. Diving from the vessel they swim for a floating life raft and begin to paddle away as the changing engines cause the boat to flop sideways again. As the team paddles desperate to avoid the ship crashing down on top of them they just narrowly avoid contact, with the ship causing a massive wave pushing the survivors to safety before it fully sinks beneath the surface. Finally safe, the team fire off the flare gun and are picked up as rescue helicopters zero in on their position.

Ooooh. This was a good one. I would watch this again, and in fact I probably will because I had to keep pausing it to do this blog post and my stream dropped out a couple of times. But no. This was good. It was very much a stereotypical disaster movie, given; lot's of dramatic explosions, lots of screaming moments and panic, and there was quite a few characters you had to get invested in quickly, but going in it's sort of to be expected. You don't stick a disaster movie on for the complex, intelligent unfurling of a storyline and for the interesting exploration of an idea. You stick it on because you want the explosions and the moments of will they / won't they survive tension and this movie gives you that in spoonful's.

I have some minor criticisms; there is a good degree of suspension of disbelief required here. The survivors all transpire to be incredibly good swimmers capable of holding their breath for extreme amounts of time. But hey, I've never been on a sinking cruise ship so what do I know? Maybe you suddenly gain extremely enhanced powers of survival faced with almost certain death? They just so happen to have Naval expert, a Fireman and an Architect among them, and despite nearly everybody else getting electrocuted, burned to death or just plain drowning they somehow magically manage to survive all of that but again it's the pretext to a disaster movie. It is what it is.

The acting, for the best part was decent enough. Kurt Russell was surprisingly normal as Robert Ramsey. Josh Lucas did err slightly on the vanilla side at times but also had incredible facial expressions that gave me strong Nicholas Cage vibes so it was a mixed blessing I guess. The female characters all basically served as damsels in distress which was slightly disappointing but maybe true to the source material? By far the person I found the most interesting was Richard Dreyfuss as Richard Nelson although he sort of faded away into the background in the second half of the movie. Would have loved him to have a more central part.

Storyline-wise, despite it being a mostly predictable disaster movie, the movie wasn't scared to kill off a few of it's main central characters, which was refreshing to a degree as really, not everybody ought to make it out alive, and the options it went with made enough sense in context to the development of the story without it falling dangerously into cheesy, cliché territory. Appreciate for a good degree they were potentially lead by the source material here, but it would have been easy to take the lazy way out in pursuit of ticking boxes but they didn't. Other than that there isn't really much to say. The movie presents scenarios that the team have to overcome and they overcome them. There isn't much more character development beyond the first 25 odd minutes and it's more about following the characters struggles to escape but again it's the context of a disaster movie and I wouldn't really expect it to be any different.

In terms of production, and this is where a disaster movie lives and dies. It was all pretty much spot on. There was plenty of spectacular disaster set pieces; explosions, flash floods, things getting obliterated, and it was all perfectly filmed and produced to the highest standard. Cinematography was pretty decent, there could have been a few more establishing shots that would have helped my screenshot game... but seriously speaking it was mostly shot pretty professionally and I have no complaints. The soundtrack of dramatic music and tension building music was layered perfectly fine with every scene and everything was pretty much done properly here to drive up the production values and make this a proper disaster movie if you like.

I did enjoy this one. No shying away from that. It wasn't so horrendously over-the-top that it all felt completely unrealistic but there was enough in terms of dramatic events to make it exciting and they did a really good job of building almost unbearable tension in a handful of key scenes that it almost overrode the nagging feeling you have in the back of your head that tells you "they're going to make it out." which is where a good disaster movie should strike the right balance. And although things got a little bit hammy in the first 15 minutes, they quickly pull it back and the remaining 1 hour 30 is very good indeed. I will definitely watch this again uninterrupted to enjoy it more thoroughly a second time. Agonising but it's crept into 4 out of 5 territory for me.