Poseidon Movie Review

Turned Upside Down and Inside Out

When an actor is made to dive into flaming water and succeed in swimming impossible distances or be burned trying, the film capturing it is documentary. Director Wolfgang Petersen (Troy, Air Force One) gave his eight leading actors catastrophic situations, filmed their heroic struggles and dangers in fulfilling the conditions of the scripted events and called it Poseidon.

Poseidon starts out as fiction. And at the start, the cinematography of John Seale (Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone) calls to mind the innovative opening shots of Master and Commander, which reinforces the illusion of fiction. The fiction is further developed as the character whom the principal actors play are introduced and set up in relation to each other. Then the disaster strikes, bringing to mind the disaster sequence in Titanic, and these characters are thrown into situations that are so demanding that the separation between actor and character is but a thin, thin veneer, which is sometimes broken through.

A luxury cruise ship is at sea with a full passenger list and a beautiful singer (Stacy Ferguson) to entertain the passengers in grand latin-rhythm style. A gambler (Josh Lucas) is aboard, seated at the Captain's table, along with a beautiful young, composed, self-confident single mother (Jacinda Barrett), her only child a precocious and uninhibited boy of about 9-years old (Jimmy Bennett). At another table is seated a group of business associates, one of whom (Richard Dreyfuss) treats the others lavishly and then takes a near-fateful walk. At an after-dinner card table the gambler faces an ex-fireman cum ex-mayor of New York (Kurt Russell) who is traveling with his college-age daughter (Emmy Rossum) and her adoring, gentlemanly boyfriend (Mike Vogel). Without her father's knowledge, as yet, she has accepted the young man's proposal of marriage. A young waiter (Freddy Rodriguez) makes himself useful to these guests, as needed, and to a young woman who is trying to make her way to New York (Mia Maestro) whom he has smuggled aboard.