Shipshape Remake

What's 'Poseidon' Without Shelley Winters? Quite a Bit Better, Actually

Worst vacation ever: Jacinda Barrett, Jimmy Bennett and Josh Lucas in Wolfgang Petersen's leaner and meaner remake of the 1972 disaster movie. (By Claudette Barius -- Warner Bros. Via Associated Press)

"Poseidon" is two words shorter in title and 20 minutes shorter in running time than "The Poseidon Adventure," its beloved 1972 predecessor. It's not so much a remake as an abbreviation. Maybe it should have been called "Posdn."

You might say: Come on. Without the blubbery excess (Red Buttons! Shelley Winters!), without the camp stylings and kitschy hamboning (Red Buttons! Shelley Winters!), "The Poseidon Adventure" is just another boat movie.

Or you might say: "Poseidon" isn't a ship, it's a freight train that just goes faster and faster. It plays like "Titanic," if "Titanic" had begun at Minute 127.

Loathing (but in a good way) both Red Buttons and Shelley Winters, I happen to prefer by far the second edition. "The Poseidon Adventure" has been fixed, not neutered. Begin with the title: The word "adventure" never belonged in a movie about a disaster. Gee, about a thousand people die: Is that an adventure? Would 9/11 or Hiroshima then qualify as "adventures?"

The director of the new movie, the German uber-pro Wolfgang Petersen, knows a little about disasters, particularly those at sea. He was, many years ago, the genius behind "Das Boot," that odyssey of German submariners. There, he showed a peculiar gift for evoking the cramped mega-mechanical hell called an U nterseeboot , and the existential horror of people trapped beneath the sea while explosions beat the hell and the spirit out of them. It wasn't much fun and it wasn't very pretty.

He brings that same imagination for ordeal to this film. He leaves out, largely, character, back story, anecdote, warm personal relations and a discussion of Christian duty (as represented in "The Poseidon Adventure" by the Rev. Gene Hackman and the Rev. Arthur O'Connell). Petersen's movie isn't cute, funny, warm, nice, inspirational or uplifting. It's about the incredible labor of survival in a world turned totally sociopathic in an instant.

And Petersen doesn't waste any time getting to that instant. The big wave hits the luxury liner Poseidon, somewhere east of Java, about 15 minutes into the movie. When it hits, it hits like a sledgehammer wielded by an angry sea god who doesn't like ships that look like the cities in '50s sci-fi movies.

Petersen doesn't spare the carnage. People die in the hundreds, the thousands. And when they die, their bodies float in the sloppage of water that sloshes through the topsy-turvy decks, or lie all twisty-still and bloodied from concussion (for some reasons, he sees explosions as a necessary result of a big ship going over).

Against this carnival of death, the film quickly isolates a small team of free thinkers. Unlike the sheep who believe in the biblical assurances from Capt. Michael Bradford (Andre Braugher) that all is well and that the tipped boat will be quickly righted, these free thinkers head up, trusting their instincts over official bromides. The two main guys are high-end gamblers (not much background, as I say, is given) played by Kurt Russell and Josh Lucas, and Lucas becomes messy so fast (his beard seems to be stimulated by adrenaline and grows out two weeks' worth in what can't be much more than three hours) that he ceases to remind you of some weird DNA lab orgy that has somehow interwoven Matthew McConaughey's gene strips with Paul Newman's. Kind of creepy, if you ask me, but I cannot seem to get any woman I know to agree with me.

Anyhow, they attract a few others who happen merely to be standing next to them when they start the journey. These consist of a mother and son; a wealthy, heartbroken gay man (Richard Dreyfuss, in the combined Red Buttons/Shelley Winters role); and an unattached beauty who gravitates between the two blond guys. Later, they encounter Russell's daughter (I know: a fantastic meet) and her boyfriend, who happen to have survived on a slightly higher -- i.e., lower -- deck (since the ship is now upside down). Kevin Dillon is briefly attached to the unit as well, but when he says, "It all comes down to luck," in a giant, bad Texas accent, you know his is about to run out.

The three women are Brunette No. 1, Brunette No. 2 and Brunette No. 3, all beautiful, all tall, all hard to tell apart. Clearly, a little Charlie's Angels maneuvering of ethnic typology and hair coloring might have helped the clarity issue. For the record, the three are Jacinda Barrett (the mom), Emmy Rossum (the daughter) and Mia Maestro (the eligible one). Does it matter?

No, because the movie is not about being, it's about doing. It's basically an ordeal by ordeal. It's one damn thing after another, and the personalities emerge from the action, they aren't imposed on it. There's no intra-squad politicking, no coups or revolutions. The movie, unlike the quasi-religious gimmickry of the first, is utterly uninterested in metaphor. The movie isn't about anything except seven people trying to survive a disaster, and some make it and some don't.

It certainly gets the three most annoying things about water: It is wet, there is a lot of it, and it wants to kill you. The water actually stalks them, and Petersen, a sadist to the end, loves to trap his squirming rats in dark, narrow spaces such as ducts or chambers and watch them fight their panic as the wet, endless killing stuff roars around them. Up, up it goes, until only flaring nostrils are left. Not pretty. If you're claustrophobic or hydrophobic, if you don't like dead things, especially people, this ain't the movie for you.

In fact, far less than "The Poseidon Adventure" (Shelley Winters! Red Buttons!), "Poseidon" reminds me of the short story "The Open Boat" (Stephen Crane!), that remorseless, existential tale about men robbed of their personalities by the intensity of the life-or-death ordeal that they face, and the whimsy with which God or nature toys with their destinies. That's one of the harsh lessons of this harsh movie: The good don't die young, and the young don't die good. Most people just die, and, as in Crane's primordial seascape, the ones who live are the ones who got lucky. Nobody says it, but the movie decodes to a survivor's epiphany in "The Open Boat": Nature " . . . did not seem cruel to him, nor beneficent, nor treacherous, nor wise. But she was indifferent, flatly indifferent."

Poseidon (97 minutes, at area theaters) is rated PG-13, but includes extremely intense scenes of carnage and death by drowning and explosion.