DVD | Poseidon

Rating: M
Duration: XX mins.
Genre: Action & Adventure.
Actors: Kurt Russell, Andre Braugher, Richard Dreyfuss, Kevin Dillon, Emmy Rossum, Jimmy Bennett, Joshua Lucas, Sheila Allen.
Release Date: 27th September.

How long can you hold your breath? That’s the question posed by Poseidon’s publicity. The cynical answer would be: Longer than Poseidon can stay in the box office top ten.

In theatres, Poseidon was just another of a long line of ‘summer’ blockbusters that failed. It seemed that the average moviegoer wanted to be bored rather than wowed as movies such as the DaVinci Code creamed the money, and sequels broke the records.

But then there was DVD. Apparently movie execs see DVDs akin to printing money – it’s all profit, and if a movie has sunk at the box office, often it gets its life back through DVD.

So why did Poseidon sink at the box office – poor expectations would be my guess. I didn’t think a remake of one of the pivotal disaster movies of the 70’s would really cut it, and I wasn’t going to waste $15 at Village Cinemas to see if I was right.

Poseidon is your typical summer blockbuster. It wows you with its visuals, and gives you a story larger than life. It takes a group of characters, and makes then the underdogs in a fight for survival against all odds.

The original Poseidon did this well, and the remake is just as good. The story line (from memory) is similar, but not a carbon copy, which is always good, as it keeps you guessing.

Being a survival adventure, it was fun to be able to predict the next victim – I know that sounds morbid, but these aren’t real people, so it’s okay. As predictable as these pivotal scenes are, it doesn’t take away from the suspense of the whole movie, though the ending did have a little bit of the whole Day After Tomorrow overdone final scene.

The biggest difference between the two Poseidon movies, and again this is from memory, as I haven’t seen the original since I was a kid, is not only the special effects, but also the body count.

The sheer number of people we see dying is a little over the top, and Warner Brothers don’t stop with showing us the dying, throughout the movie we see the underdog survivors having to clamber over mountains of dead bodies, so much so that you half expect it to turn into a zombie movie and have hordes of the living dead come after the survivors as well.

I know it’s a disaster movie on a grand scale, but I can grasp that an enormous amount of people must have lost their lives with out having to be personally introduced to half their corpses.

An entire disk of special features, including a documentary of the phenomenon of rouge waves looks very enticing (and I will watch this at a later stage) and makes for a great companion to a disaster movie remake that holds it’s own.

Food for thought:
Do you forge your own path, or passively follow the crowd?

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