Ahoy, avast, other miscellaneous sea-related cliches

Our first film screening was for The Poseidon Adventure during the induction days. It definitely falls into the category of films I would only enjoy watching in company both because of the scary elements (a childhood of family sailing holidays has taught me only too well how frightening boats can be when they're perfectly functional, let alone inverted) and because it's just a little to cheesy to take seriously.

The frights are achieved very simply by suspense, and damn good suspense at that. In contrast to the remake, a sense of doom is created from the very beginning as we learn that the sinister big business in charge is running the Poseidon unsafely. This build-up continues with the escalating news of an earthquake nearby and the possibility this will create a wave, shown in counterpoint to the essential Character Introductions and Humanisations, which are themselves quick and effective. For instance, we learn that Scott is clearly a Good Guy because he's nice to the waiters - an excellent substitute for rescuing a cat from a tree when there are no cats or trees handy. All this means that when the wave does hit, the audience is already in a state of tension.

This only slightly ruined by the alienating effect of seeing Leslie Neilson playing the captain - I more than a little expected him to say "don't call me Shirley" but that's the cannibalistic nature of parodies for you.

The characters were generally very well done, with a fantastic cast all in all. Gene Hackman just has what it takes to grab your attention onscreen and hang onto it, and his character was especially interesting since it seemed subversive to have such an unconventional hero: a minister who didn't want God's help. The others were mostly sympathetic - the lovely grandparents, the kind middle-aged man, the fiery dame, the grizzled ex-cop, the sweet teenager - with two big exceptions for the annoying 10 year old (TM) and the utterly useless weeping damsel. So many opportunites to drown such an annoying character, and yet - ! All wasted.

Overall, I enjoyed The Poseidon Adventure for what it was - a well told suspense/action/adventure story. It fitted its running time snugly and made allusions to loftier themes (faith, sacrifice, self-sufficiency, and of course, human relationships).

Poseidon, on the other hand, is offensively bad. The biggest thing I took away from it is that sometimes, to survive, you have to kick people in the face. Which would be an interesting moral dilemma - what is more important, personal survival or personal integrity? - except that the narrative then skips blithely onto the next laws-of-physics defying set-piece. While CGI may be better, the story just doesn't do its job to make you care.

Finally a technical note which, for the well informed, is a serious flaw. My sister is an architect and she watched the remake with me and winced the whole way through. She could just about accept the characterisations but two elements just don't add up:

• if the ship was properly ballasted, there would be no danger of inversion occuring; this isn't a problem in the original since it's explained away but there's no mention of anything intially unsafe about the Poseidon in Poseidon
• in both films, characters walk about on the ceilings as if they were floors - this simply would not happen; there needs to be space for services (such as electricity and water) and this would be in the ceiling space, covered by a thin layer which would collapse if walked on. Realistically, then, the characters should have been stomping through ceiling tiles like walking in snow. 

This is evidence that everyone reads films differently (not knowing about architectural structures the second point didn't even occur to me) and that you should always get an engineer to proofread your script.