Poseidon

Poseidon (2006)
Director: Wolfgang Petersen

When I watch films I like to play a game invented by David Letterman called “Is this anything?” The game is played thusly: You watch a performer and decide if the performance is something.

This film is nothing. It has almost zero character development, very predictable storyline, cheesy dialog, and amazing special effects. When are studios going to learn that until your story is as solid as your special effects you’ve got nothing?

This movie is about a ship sinking and people escaping. That’s it. I just summed up the entire movie and all its important plot points in 10 words. That’s not a good sign.

The problem with this film is, a rogue wave hits Poseidon (that’s the name of the ship they are all sailing on) about 15 minutes into the 1 hours and 40 minute movie. That leaves 15 minutes for the character development of no less than 8 characters. The rest all end up dying so there is no use expending energy on their lives is there.

The problem with having the disaster come so soon is that there is no time to develop character so when the actors are thrown into their perilous situations you think…Who is this guy again? And why am I supposed to care? The death of a character only takes seconds on screen while it takes a good while to develop an interesting and compelling character. What they should have done, was spend the whole movie developing the 8 main characters and then have them escape over the course of the last 15 minutes. I guarantee that would have made for a much more interesting film.

That, incidentally, is one of the things that made “Alien” such a great film (especially when compared to so many other monster movies). Ridley Scott spent more of the film building the characters than he did killing them. I think the monster doesn’t even make its first appearance until halfway through the film. Wolfgang Petersen can make a good film, but this is not one of them. This film is utterly ridiculous despite the excellent cast.

My Rating: 2 out of 5