Poseidon

Beyond being a showplace for crash-and-burn effects, Poseidon seems to be stumping for togetherness.

An extremely well-crafted exercise in physical invention and fear. Yet within those limits--the limits of a pop-digital survival drama--Poseidon is an exciting show.

In the plus column, Poseidon is a tightly-paced action movie that doesn’t depend too much on special effects for its thrills.

After 9/11 and Katrina, this megabudget remake by Wolfgang Petersen benefits from a similar cultural oomph, though it's just as enjoyably silly as the original.

Maybe it's the era we're living in, but the new film is as much fun as a shroud.

Poseidon is a sodden saga, with a script that is awash in clichés. It nearly drowns under the weight of its own soggy tedium.

It's "Das Bomb." It's "The Perfunctory Storm."

Ce remake du film périmenaze de 1972 éclipse sans forcer son aîné ; il lui enfonce même la tête sous l'eau avec une facilité déconcertante ! Ici, ce n'est pas "la croisière s'amuse" mais la croisière qui fait glouglou : glouglou le gros bateau ! et par le réalisateur... du Bateau. Aidé de moult effets spéciaux très convaincants et de décors impressionnants, Wolfgang Petersen va droit à l'essentiel et nous coule ce rafiot fissa en une heure et demi. Le temps d'exposition est très réduit et on passe rapidement au plat de résistance : voir tous ces bourges boire la tasse devient jubilatoire et très spectaculaire, nous faisant oublier cette chienlit interminable du Titanic à dormir debout. Et c'en est presque comique aussi avec toutes ces morts brutales. Mais ça, c'est involontaire je crois... Même la guimauve est réduite au strict minimum et je regrette que le gamin idiot s'en tire. Mais c'est toujours mieux que le clébard, heureusement absent ici, resté à la niche. C'est parfois cependant assez confus, surtout vers la fin, car à trop vouloir en faire, le film exagère un tantinet dans la catastrophe et on ne se montrera pas trop regardant non plus sur le scénario lui-même qui tire des ficelles grosses comme des amarres. Très efficace en tout cas ce Poséidon et très divertissant !

The visuals are impressive and the actors do their best to work through the script. I've seen worse disaster films, Poseidon was entertaining for being a loose remake.

A remake is not always an automatic negative. The visuals are quite impressive, and if you look beyond some mediocre acting, you actually may be entertained.

Overuse of CGI, a jumble of writing, and a series of scenes that made me ask, could these people even exist? A ships sinking normally interests me, for I am a buff of wrecks and ship disasters and I've always been interested in the history of these sunken vessels, but this film looks more to me like an animation mixed with real people, only it's uncanny and to an extent disturbing. Should have stuck with the original, plain and simple. It's macabre in every shape, size, and hue.

Blockbuster disaster movies usually live or die by the quality of their special effects. Poseidon, perhaps embracing this sensibility, storms right out of the gates with its money shot, a flyby tour of the doomed ship's exterior from all angles that could be generously described as half as impressive as it sounds. The CGI looks like a student reel, amateurish and fake with some goofy footage of soon-to-be hero Josh Lucas jogging the upper decks awkwardly cut in. It's a downhill slide from there as the thin plot yields to the power of impressive post-production effects, hoping for a bail-out. That particular cavalry never manages to arrive. A surprisingly star-studded cast struggles with one dimensional characters, banal "here's what I'm looking at" dialogue and plot twists so by-the-book I was able to accurately predict each on-screen death well in advance. It's a bland, generic, cash-in of a remake that isn't even afforded the buoy of good eye candy. Don't bother.