What a feelin' when you're dancing on the ceiling
Disaster movies in the 70s were the superproductions of their time, bridging the gap between the old Hollywood spectacles and the modern blockbusters. No stars spared, no event too big that it couldn't be portrayed. A plane! (
Airport 77). A boat! (
The Poseidon Adventure). The tallest building in the world! (
The Towering Inferno). The entire state of California! (
Earthquake). Recently, though, the disaster movie has fallen on hard times, having to form alliances with other genres, strategic alliances as it were, to draw in the crowds. The star-crossed love story/disaster movie (
Titanic), the tv-movie-of-the-week/disaster movie (
10.5 Apocalypse), the docu-drama/disaster movie (
United 93, on which more another time), the action/disaster movie (
Armaggedon). The honest-to-God, straight up disaster movie has gotten watered down to the point that it's B-movie, almost-retired and could-be-on-the-WB bland teen stars that populate them, not the legendary actors of old. Many of these films, including those more recent straight-up disaster films like
Daylight and
The Day After Tomorrow were, let's face it, not very good.
Genre pics such as horror movies have survived and thrived in the current Hollywood climate because they can be made on a shoestring budget with young, unknown (cheap!) actors and by first time directors eager to try out new ideas and styles. Ultimately this results in just as many bad films, but it's ok, since there was less at stake to begin with, except perhaps the ego of the filmmaker him/herself. This model doesn't work for disaster movies, which require the spectacle of the disaster itself, each time some never-before-visualised event that has to out-do whatever was seen the year before (expensive and time-consuming), and I can attest to how punishingly difficult realising those spectacles can be for the digital artists being asked to create the impossible, again. I watched Donna and many of my friends work themselves into the ground for the visual effects in Poseidon, struggling to get the water fluid simulations to work, the debris to float just so, the boat to have that.. je ne sais quoi, to the exacting specifications of the higher-ups. Then there's the collection of actors, each demanding high salaries, add a director who knows what he's doing because you don't want to risk all this on some newbie, and before you know it you have a bloated two hundred million dollar film that you need to try and sell sell sell. I couldn't imagine that sinking this much money, time and effort could be worth it for a film that elicited a look of confusion on most people's faces - "didn't they already, like, make that movie?". Faced with a few too many real disasters, trying to wring entertainment value from watching a few people attempt to survive some rare cataclysmic event in a too-expensive film, and then sell that to a reluctant public is a task I would hate to have. The Warner Bros executives, staring at the return grosses for the film, must be wondering how they got into it in the first place.
Surprising, then, that Poseidon was a solid, entertaining straight ahead disaster movie, with the appropriate amount of cheese to go with it. Packed with a crowd of hey haven't I seen that actor somewhere before faces (note to Emily Rossum's agent - no more disaster movies for your client. Stop now!), game turns from Kurt Russell, an almost fully fleshed-out Richard Dreyfuss, and a charistmatic leading man in Josh Lucas, holding his head up despite his grossly underwritten character.
The structure of the film is simple; fifteen minutes of establishing time and place (New Year's Eve on a huge cruise ship somewhere on the Atlantic), notably in an opening shot that is sweeping and utterly breathtaking, even more incredible for the fact that it was entirely synthetic. Then the wave hits, the boat flips, and then the film is a series of set pieces as a small group of survivors try to make their way out through the top, or rather the bottom of the boat, facing life or death problems along the way. Not everyone makes it of course, and people die according to their perceived importance (e.g. in one case an obnoxious character doesn't just fall off a rickety walkway, he gets what looks like a piece of an engine fall on him - may as well have been a grand piano - a cartoony 'oh no' expression on his face as it approaches. In another case one of the 'heroes' dies performing a bit of 'greater good' heroism). One wise decision - not to give any reason for the rogue wave that flips the boat. No lazy treatise on global warming, terrorism, man-provoked natural disaster, or other problem-du-jour, it just happens, and it's astonishing in its power and 21st-century visual effects punch. Inside the boat, I enjoyed seeing how director Wolfgang Petersen was able to keep successive set pieces interesting, and in what must have been difficult and constraining shooting conditions, he conveys the claustrophobia of the situation while still managing to shoot it in interesting ways. Shame his characters say such dumb, cheesy things most of the time. I get the feeling that Petersen, a director responsible for a few of my favourite popcorn films, In The Line of Fire and Air Force One included, cannot transcend the raw material that he is given (or chooses?) to film. So, given lemons, he doesn't quite manage to make lemonade, but he does know how to shoot those lemons! Maybe that analogy isn't going to get very far. Hmm.
I would have liked more character development, especially in the case of Josh Lucas's "I work alone" gambler, the most obvious protagonist. And it would have been nice to have had a little more leavening humour in the proceedings, everyone seems to be taking the whole thing a little too seriously. The laughs come from some of the awful things the characters have to say without sarcasm or irony, but I see that as part of a long tradition of these films, a fact mined by Airplane! whose parody comes from the actors saying the most ridiculous things with a straight face.
Joey, do you like movies about Gladiators?
Over Macho Grande? No, I don't think I'll ever get over Macho Grande...
Nevertheless, I was engaged all the way through, right to the end when the sea finally claims the doomed ship as the survivors float nearby, alone in the vast ocean. I can think of many, many movies that provided me less entertainment, and that had less craft in their making. Was it worth re-making? Was it worth the money that the studio put into it, as well as the months of my friends' time and sacrifice to get it made? ...
Poseidon | Review | Movies | Disaster | Airplane!
