Wolfgang Petersen turns the ship over inside ten minutes and spends the rest of a brisk 98 running strangers through flooded corridors. The water is convincing, the ventilation shaft is properly frightening, and nobody on board is worth knowing.
Wolfgang Petersen has made one film about men in a submarine and another about men on a fishing boat in a storm, so an upside-down ocean liner is at least a promotion in tonnage. Poseidon remakes The Poseidon Adventure from 1972, both taken from Paul Gallico’s novel, and Mark Protosevich’s screenplay strips the story to its hull. The ship is over inside ten minutes. The whole film is done in 98. It is good at corridors and bad at people.
The capsize is the best thing in it. It is New Year’s Eve, the ballroom is counting down, Gloria (Fergie) is singing, and Captain Bradford (Andre Braugher) has just raised a glass when the bridge sees the wave. John Seale keeps the camera inside the ballroom as the floor tilts, so the tables slide before anyone understands why, and then the chandeliers come down to meet the guests. Peter Honess cuts it without the usual flurry: we see the roll, we see where people land, and the pause afterwards, with the lights swinging, is the only quiet the film allows itself. We were gripped. We were also, within a minute or two, aware that several hundred people had just died in that room and the film had already stopped thinking about them.
It picks out a dozen instead. Dylan Johns (Josh Lucas) is a gambler who prefers his own company and then leads everybody. Robert Ramsey (Kurt Russell) used to be mayor of New York. Maggie James (Jacinda Barrett) has a small son, Conor (Jimmy Bennett). Richard Nelson (Richard Dreyfuss) is an architect who has been left by the man he loves. Protosevich gives each of them one fact and nothing to do with it, and the actors spend the film shouting each other’s names in the dark. Kevin Dillon’s Lucky Larry, drunk, loud and selfish, is the one person on board we would have liked more of. Mía Maestro’s Elena, a stowaway, and Freddy Rodriguez’s Valentin, a waiter, are written as people the leads are kind enough to bring along.
What Petersen does know how to do is stage the inside of a ship that is the wrong way up. William Sandell’s sets put the carpets overhead and turn the lift shafts into tunnels. The ventilation shaft is the sequence to remember: a line of adults and a boy crawling through a duct barely wider than their shoulders while the water rises behind them, Seale’s light cut down to a torch beam and whatever comes through the grilles. We held our breath with them, and noticed afterwards that our shoulders had come up around our ears. Klaus Badelt’s score hammers through all of it. Erica Edell Phillips dresses everyone for a party and then lets the evening wear come apart, gowns torn to the knee and dinner jackets black with oil.
The shaft is the one set piece with a shape of its own. The rest are variations: a flooded corridor, a climb, a door that will not open, another flooded corridor. The water inside the sets is real and heavy and frightening. The water outside, the wave itself and the hull seen from below, is computer work with the weightless shine of effects from this period, so the shot the whole film is named for looks like the least dangerous thing in it. By the last half hour we were no longer frightened, only waiting to see who would be left, and we were a little ashamed that the film had taught us to count that way.
The 1972 film gave its survivors a preacher with a grudge against God and let them argue about who deserved saving. Petersen and Protosevich have cut all of that for pace, and they get pace. Petersen’s own Das Boot knew that the waiting is where you find out who people are. Nobody here waits, so nobody here is anybody.
Most critics came away about where we have, impressed by the water and bored by the people, and we see no reason to argue. It is a fair evening if a liner turning over is what you came for: short, loud, with one properly frightening passage and a 12A certificate that keeps the drownings just out of frame. Watch it with the sound up and the lights off, and do not expect to remember anyone’s name by morning.
