I honestly don’t know why I even watched this movie. In a few months I’ll be embarking on a New Year’s Eve cruise and I certainly didn’t need the kinds of images and situations this film conjures up residing in my noggin as I step onto that giant boat.
I’ve had the same basic problem ever since I started watching Lost. Now every time I’m waiting to board a plane I start looking around the boarding area, trying to figure out who would be the “hunter” of the group, the “leader,” the trouble-maker, the feuding couple, the chubby comic relief guy, etc. Not to mention the fact as soon as we’re airborne and hit any kind of turbulence I immediately go pale recalling the shot from the pilot where the whole tail section completely breaks off.
I’ll interpret as a protective measure (to ensure that people would still indeed be willing to pay for expensive cruises) that the filmmakers behind Poseidon intended to make their ship look as fake as possible so as to accent the fictional nature of the story. The opening shot sends the audience flying under, over, around and through the ship in one unmistakably computer-generated sequence.
Had the virtual camera actually behaved or moved in a way an actual camera might physically be able to do (even strapped to a helicopter), I might have actually bought off on the idea this was a real ship. Perhaps the special effects crew was just so darn pleased with all the fine, intricate detail work that went into making their computerized model they just really wanted to show it off. All of it. And, to be perfectly honest, it is a very impressive and detailed digital model, it’s just that this shot really, really shows it to be nothing else and that instantly pulled me out of the world of the film. Sadly, very little that happened afterwards seemed to care much about trying to pull me back in.
Poseidon’s plot isn’t very complicated. The giant cruise ship Poseidon is out on a New Year’s Eve cruise when it gets struck by a rogue wave that capsizes the boat. A bunch of people are killed instantly, but a few stalwart individuals take it upon themselves to try and find a way out by trudging up through to the bottom of the ship. These are the folks we get extremely brief introductions to in the first few minutes of the movie. We don’t learn much about them (I guess Poseidon is into the “less is more” theory of character development) so they all end up being little more than bodies to be killed or spared with the audience not really giving a damn either way.
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