Arrow Video: Poseidon (2006) - Reviewed

Images courtesy of Arrow Video

Irwin Allen and Ronald Neame’s 1972 disaster survival thriller The Poseidon Adventure was a game-changing blockbuster following the success of Airport that all but kicked off the visual effects driven natural and/or manmade catastrophe movie craze throughout the decade.  Based on the 1969 novel by Paul Gallico, it was a star-studded widescreen thriller about a luxury ocean liner on its way from Athens to New York when a tsunami strikes and capsizes the ship leaving passengers fighting for survival as they try to make it to the surface through the bowels of the watercraft.  Though some of the effects-work involves the use of obvious miniatures, it is mostly an endurance trained on actors moving through explosive fiery obstacle courses going through tunnels (sometimes underwater) and corridors trying simply to escape alive, paving the way for such intense maritime thrillers as Das Boot and The Abyss.
 
Sometime in the early 2000s amid Hollywood’s (and now Disney’s) impetus to remake every preexisting former blockbuster intellectual property under the sun, the idea of redoing The Poseidon Adventure came about through Warner Brothers who with Das Boot and The Perfect Storm producer-director Wolfgang Petersen, Akiva Goldsman and Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World producer Duncan Henderson.  With both The Perfect Storm followed by Troy being major box-office hits, the project now simply titled Poseidon was greenlit with a $160 million price tag.  Working from a script by The Cell screenwriter Mark Protosevich and featuring both lavish production design utilizing a combination of digitally rendered and real environments, large water tanks for flooding sequences and detailed computer generated imagery from Industrial Light & Magic, the star-studded film featuring Josh Lucas, Kurt Russell, Richard Dreyfuss, Kevin Dillon and Andre Braugher unfortunately proved to be a tactical misfire that lost money for the studio and critical drubbing sent its director back to Germany for his presently final film. 
 
Supposedly originally structured like the original with back stories introducing all of the characters individually so we care about what happens to them in the course of the story, running around 123 minutes originally before shorn to 98 minutes by Wolfgang Petersen himself, in theory Poseidon could’ve worked as first assembled.  However, to hurry things along, Petersen launches the tidal wave within the first fifteen minutes after barely brushing by beleaguered New York Mayor Robert Ramsey (Kurt Russell) and his daughter Jennifer (Emmy Rossum) and her boyfriend Christian (Mike Vogel), gambler Dylan Jones (Josh Lucas), single mother Maggie (Jacinda Barrett) and her son Conor (Jimmy Bennett), architect Richard Nelson (Richard Dreyfuss), nightclub singer Gloria (Stacy “Fergie” Ferguson) and foolishly proud Captain Michael Bradford (Andre Braugher rehearsing his town skeptic for The Mist).  You get all of that?  If it sounds crushed together and hurried, it proves to be the film’s most fatal flaw as action sequences of characters falling down tunnels to their deaths or drowning barely registers.

 
Trying to one-up Titanic in terms of visual effects that look terribly dated and artificial now, replete with exterior shots coming out of the back of the boat to a digitally rendered aerial shot, the actors and stunt people give their all for this but somehow something is amiss.  Between the bland and clunky script from the guy who eventually would pen I Am Legend, Thor and the ill-fated Spike Lee redux of Oldboy, half-hearted performances from stars like Richard Dreyfuss (who later admitted it was a paycheck and nothing more), Catwoman and Ultraviolet composer Klaus Badelt’s bombastic overproduced unremarkable score and middling camerawork unbelievably from future Mad Max: Fury Road cinematographer John Seale, Poseidon is like a ship that started sailing before you can get all of your luggage on board.  Kurt Russell tries but even he can’t get past the averageness of the characterization and direction.

 
There’s no denying Wolfgang Petersen is a legendary filmmaker behind such genre classics as the aforementioned Das Boot, the German-English fantasy epic The Neverending Story, the marooned in space thriller Enemy Mine and most notably the Clint Eastwood vehicle In the Line of Fire and the Harrison Ford starring Air Force One.  He has clearly left his mark on the silver screen and tragically left our world in the summer of 2022, leaving behind a legacy that starts off strong only to crash and burn with this.  Released theatrically in the spring of 2006, the mammoth production featuring a 70mm IMAX release only made $181.7 million against its $160 million production budget.  Worse still, marketing and distribution costs accounted for an estimated $80 million in losses for Warner Brothers.  Critics were even less kind to the endeavor including Roger Ebert who previously championed the director, saying it didn’t even rise to the level of ‘enjoyable trash’.  While nominated for an Academy Award and the Visual Effects Society for Best Visual Effects, it also garnered a Golden Raspberry nomination and a Stinkers Bad Movie Awards for Worst Remake.

 
For whatever reason, Arrow Video has been on a mission to excavate and rerelease this artistic and commercial failure of a film in a new deluxe 4K UHD limited edition replete with Dolby Vision encoding and newly conducted interviews with the cinematographer, production designer, visual effects supervisor, makeup effects artist and archival featurettes ported from the DVD and Blu-ray discs from Warner.  It also comes with reversible sleeve art and an illustrated collector’s booklet since this film apparently secretly has a fanbase somewhere out in the ether.  A film that hasn’t aged all that well and is crucially missing interesting characters, pacing and most of all the physicality of the Ronald Neame adaptation.  

Yes our poor ensemble cast had to do a ton of underwater scenes such as swimming through tunnels or being near hot fire burning on the set.  But if you aren’t allowed to get to know, well, anybody, it’s hard to care, right?  And at the end of the day, there’s a reason people still watch the 1972 film featuring powerful performances from Gene Hackman and Ernest Borgnine, elevating B-movie trash to still affecting genre thriller cinema.  It grieves me to give this Petersen effort, his third waterborne actioner since Das Boot and The Perfect Storm, a hard pass.  A well-mounted production that's ultimately perfunctory and soulless.  Now Arrow Video, if you’re listening, please stop giving these stillborn turds (the remake of Clash of the Titans and The Invasion in particular) the royal red-carpet treatment.

--Andrew Kotwicki