Wolfgang Peterson's 2006 remake of The Poseidon Adventure is, like the original film and the novel that it's based on, set on a massive ocean liner which sets sail on New Year's Eve. As the vessel heads out to see, it's smacked by a massive rogue wave and it capsizes killing many of its passengers and crew members.

The captain of the boat (Andre Braugher) wants everyone who is in the ship's massive ballroom to stay where they are, insisting that the GPS system will alert rescue crews to their location and telling everyone that there's enough air in the boat to keep them afloat until they arrive. Of course, a few passengers decide to branch out on their own. A former fireman named Robert Ramsey (Kurt Russell) wants to get his daughter out of the nightclub that she and her boyfriend, Christian (Mike Vogel) were in before the ship turned over. With some help from a playboy type named Dylan Johns (Josh Lucas), a gay architect named Richard Nelson (Richard Dreyfuss), a crewmember named Valentine (Freddie Rodriguez) and his stowaway girlfriend, Mia (Elena Morales) they decide to make a break for the stranded kids. A mother and her young son, Maggie (Jacinda Barrett) and Connor James (Jimmy Bennett), are along for the haul as is an obnoxious gambler named Lucky Larry (Kevin Dillon).

Of course, as this group makes their way towards what they hope will be safety, the ship continues to sink which causes more than a few problems for our survivors. As they climb through the ship, now completely upside down, they have to deal with fire, electrical problems, debris of all kind, and of course, the rising water and not everyone will make it out alive...

Peterson has assembled a pretty solid ensemble cast for his 'update' of the original film and he's used all the technology at his disposal to provide plenty of spectacle. Unfortunately, somewhere along the way someone forgot to actually bother to develop the characters and so the talented actors and actresses who appear in the film are essentially wasted in very basic roles that are almost entirely interchangeable (surprisingly the only one who really stands out is Kevin Dillon, simply because he's essentially there for comic relief). The script tries to tug at our heart strings fairly consistently throughout the film - Connor is almost constantly in jeopardy and we can feel for his understandably concerned mother, but we can also see all of this coming. Once the kid enters the frame, before the ship even sinks, you know he's going to wind up in constant danger and while there was a similar character in the superior original film, that character played a more important role to the survival of the crew as a whole, whereas here he's nothing more than a plot device meant to evoke our sympathy. Russell is decent enough as the tough old guy of the bunch, but Josh Lucas feels like he's aping Matthew McConaghy here and not doing a particularly good job of it at that. Dreyfuss' character is given very little to do and could have been played by anyone, while Rodriguez gets so little screen time that you'll have forgotten all about him by the time that the movie is over.

Keep that in mind as you go into Poseidon. If you go in knowing that the film is little more than a showcase for some admittedly very impressive special effects and some rather spectacular set pieces and keep your expectations in check accordingly, it's not a horrible film at all. It looks absolutely gorgeous and while some of the CGI that was cutting edge a few years ago is starting to show its age, Peterson has done a pretty impressive job creating a spectacle. He's given us a lot to look at here -t here are plenty of explosions and waves and scenes of water levels getting higher and higher and some amazing sound design work at play here. There is a solid atmosphere in the film and some good tension worked in among the scenes of sappiness and melodrama. For some this may be enough to give the film a pass, and there's certainly nothing wrong with that. The picture is entertaining enough as it stands, but you can't help but feel it should and could have been a whole lot better.

Video:

Warner's 2.40.1 anamorphic widescreen 1080p high definition presentation of Poseidon look pretty decent even if it makes the already dated CGI scenes look exceptionally phony. The famous opening shot in which our hero runs across the deck of the massive boat, done entirely in green screen, may have once looked amazingly realistic to less discerning eyes but here looks like the digital effect that it is. That complaint aside, the transfer is otherwise quite good. The underwater scenes look surprisingly clear and there aren't any obvious authoring issues like edge enhancement or compression artifacts to complain about. Detail levels are noticeably improved over the standard definition release and color reproduction looks great. There are a couple of spots where shadow detail isn't quite as strong as it could be and things get just a little bit murky but overall this is quite a good looking picture we have here.