Thankfully, I avoided seeing this in the cinema. If I had made the trip I fear I may have walked out well before the end. Everything about this movie screams of a "hack job". The opening sequence where we see the big ship and our star Josh Lucas running about on deck is one of the worst CGI sequences I have ever seen on film. It was pathetic. Titanic was made over ten years ago on the virtually the same budget and it looked far superior to this. But I could forgive that, it only lasted like 60 seconds and it's the movie itself that matters not the opening shots. However it soon got worse. Every character in Poseidon are so poorly underwritten and are all the typical stereotypes of a Hollywood disaster movie. So we get a firefighter, a stowaway, a cocky but charming gambler etc. All there persona's have been crafted for the plot, giving us no reason to like or care about any of the them. Hell, I wanted them all to be killed off, I was given no reason to want them to live. A couple of action sequences once the ship begins to flood are quite nicely done and some of the death scenes of characters are handled quite well. It's just a shame that we didn't care anything for them because of the terrible script. How did Wolfgang Petersen manage to make a movie as shit as this I will never know. In The Line of Fire and Air Force One were really fun action movies and for god's sake he made the classic Das Boot. Hell, if you take Brad Pitt out of the equation then I would probably have liked Troy too.
rating: 2
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Poseidon is one of the worst movies I have seen this year. It's a perfect example of what happens when studio's throw big amounts of money to a script because of the movie's concept and the fact that the original was popular. It's a sad day when young and hungary film-makers around the globe are constantly being rejected for their new innovative ideas when Hollywood churns this crap out.