Movie rating PG-13 for scenes of panic and terror (yeah that’s what it said it was rated for).  It is an hour and twenty-three minutes long.  It stars Kurt Russell, Emmy Rosum and Josh Lucas. 

Poseidon is a remake of an original, which seems to be a habit among hollywood.  Take a film that was fine in the first place and make another, more technically advanced and enhanced version, and hope that it out performs the original.  The plot hasn’t changed, but teh cast of characters has.  There is no old couple who each take turns to death.  There is no young fresh Sally Field character which keeps the cast interesting as you wonder who will be her hero.  There is no Gene Hackman, well actually that isn’t true, Kurt Russell takes the role of hero with tragic ends.  This movie, for those of you who have never seen the original, is about a cruise ship that gets hit by a rogue wave and ends up bottoms up.  The ship flips and most peopel end up dead, however the boat does not immediatly sink.  It floats and a group of survivors decides they can’t wait and they need to find a way out, before it is too late.  In the original there are two groups of traveling survivors, but in this version there is one one wandering band.

Personally I will probably never take a cruise, this movie scared me, but it isn’t the only one.  It made me wonder if there were such things as rogue waves, but then again I worry about giant enhanced sharks, hitting icebergs and the ship splitting in two, and being on a ship full of ghosts that only want to kill me and own my soul.  This movie gives me another reason for not going on a cruise, why go on a ship that has the possibility of flipping upside down if no one is going to think of finding a way to swim out?  I mean there are openings created by the whole accident, so why not try swimming out before the ship sinks?  Maybe that was just me, but I would have thought at least one other person would raise that question.

I thought this was all right, but why remake a movie that was good and still is good to begin with?!  Watching this I felt that hollywood seems to depend too much on special effects and not enough on the development of a character.  Especially of Josh Lucus’s character, Dillion.  He is actually not a great guy and doesn’t want to be held back by a bunch of others yet in the end he risks his life for a few of them, which didn’t make sense to me in regards to how his character was developed.  Also at least two of the characters that seemed important had minor roles and ended up being useless. 

I reccomend watchign this movie for some of the special effects.  Every now and then images of the boat underwater are spectacular, and the horror of bodies floating around and the death was wonderfully done.  Yet this movie lacks something, and for me I felt is was the interest in which characters die or live.  There just isn’t enough background for me to care, and honestly I don’t know why I should care who lives or dies. 

Rent the original and see Gene Hackman and Sally Field do a great job, then rent this version and realize that not everything is better the second time around.

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