All Overboard

Poseidon

Directed by Wolfgang Petersen

"Turn Turtle" was the phrase used in the original The Poseidon Adventure to describe how the Poseidon ocean liner was flipped on its back by a seismic tidal wave one fateful New Year's Eve. But that cute marine metaphor has been discarded in the new remake, Poseidon. Impersonally directed by Wolfgang Petersen (Das Boot, The Perfect Storm), the film's dry blandness deserves a familiar land metaphor, "Hiding your head in the sand." What made Ronald Neame's 1972 film more than an action movie was its unapologetic social allegory-that's why The Poseidon Adventure's diverse-citizens-in-crisis plot continues to exert fascination over 30 years later. (Its popcorn narrative is as classical and universal as Greek drama.) Unfortunately, Petersen's 2006 version addresses a world that, post-9/11, is perplexed by politics and personal interrelations. Petersen avoids political and philosophical meaning in order to pander to the video game, summer blockbuster market. Avoiding the most obvious, compelling reason to retell the story of a social microcosm struggling to survive adverse circumstances means Poseidon has no real reason to exist.

Anyone who ridicules or excuses Poseidon as just a summer thrill ride, without reflecting on contemporary worries, might as well be watching with their heads in the sand. It's clear from last month's thrill ride, United 93, that audience's perceptions have "turned turtle"-gone topsy-turvy, shifted into uninquiring subjectivity. There's a horrible new kind of escapism in which audiences and moviemakers alike abandon the idea of metaphor. The refusal to find significance in the symbolic or recognizable processes of storytelling is more alarming than just accepting Hollywood clichés; it indicates film culture's serious moral breakdown.

The original film's passenger manifest was full of worthy Oscar winners, bringing iconic, campy, real-actor punch: Gene Hackman, Ernest Borgnine, Shelley Winters, Stella Stevens and the rest were representatives of ourselves. This film's C-list cast-Josh Lucas, Kurt Russell, Richard Dreyfuss, Emmy Rossum, Jacinda Barrett, Kevin Dillon and Fergie from Black Eyed Peas-are so dull, they're virtually ciphers. Petersen's cast of nonentities epitomizes an era that refuses to recognize political or human significance in movies.

This became evident last summer when some people objected to War of the Worlds as too intense for a post-9/11 entertainment; they couldn't see how transposing real-life trauma into artful metaphor was an effort towards catharsis. Unsurprisingly, the insipid United 93 has been widely accepted by feeble-minded viewers who lack communal and spiritual imagination. They prefer banality to the visionary sting of art. Poseidon has been made according to those same mindless terms. It follows the video game formula that substitutes interminable physical obstacles for characterization, thus negating moral dilemma. When the Poseidon's survivors float in a red lifeboat, awaiting helicopter rescue, nothing's at stake. There's nothing to save.

Only if that lifeboat were to turn turtle would audiences have to snap out of their post-Titanic, CGI torpor and contemplate peril, love, community, faith-the issues that originally kept The Poseidon Adventure afloat.

The "Summer Blockbuster" trend fools the public into Hollywood business-as-usual. But reject today's craven practices and recall that the entertainment imperative used to be respectable when '70s disaster epics represented a different impulse. Those post-Vietnam sagas were about healing national anxieties. Rescue meant more in those films than even the sacrifices portrayed in United 93. But now, the wholesale devastation in Poseidon partakes of "the culture of death," a phrase from the self-reflexive Jurassic Park which predicted the cultural miasma of 9/11 that is reflected in both United 93 and Poseidon.

The post-9/11 Hollywood action film tends to promote finger-pointing self-righteousness and division. There's no equivalent here to the fine ethical argument between Hackman's lay priest and Borgnine's businessman. Every Poseidon passenger is obnoxious-even Dreyfuss' sentimentalized gay Jewish elder (first, he seems to be playing Shelley Winters, then Peter Finch in Sunday, Bloody Sunday). Defying an unseen enemy, they're all hateful-blue staters/red staters.

The ship's token black, Captain Andre Braugher (he's playing Morgan Freeman), comes closest to political rhetoric when he announces, "We were struck by a rogue wave; they're lethal." Could he mean terrorists? Or is it Hurricane Katrina and not 9/11 that Petersen conveniently exploits? No surprise, then, that along with shoving our heads in sand, Poseidon flips us over in muck.