The Plot:
On New Year's Eve, the luxury liner Poseidon is knifing its way through the water like the haughty luxury spa on stabilizers that it pretends to be. As part of the passenger list, we meet professional gambler Dylan (who goes by one name, like Cher, or cancer) former fire fighter and high profile ex-mayor Robert Ramsey, his coy as a cover girl daughter Jennifer and her doting fiancé Christian. Also along for the cruise are single mom Maggie James and her pest-like precocious son Conor, a depressed gay man named Richard Nelson, a slimy lounge lizard who goes by the moronic moniker of Lucky Larry and Elena, a fidgety shipboard stowaway who's desperate to see her dying brother (she's currently bunking with ship's steward Valentin). When a rogue wave decides to neck with Poseidon's poop deck, our oceanic hotel does a flip flop, and its not long before people start dying and the ship starts sinking. Frantic to find a way out, Dylan decides to head for the engine room. Soon, he has a ragtag collection of survivors following him. Explosions happen. Characters die. Water flows. Some individuals even sacrifice themselves for the betterment of the others. In the end, few survive. The rest go down with the ship, their dignity destined for a place in Davy Jone's already overflowing locker.

The DVD:
Poseidon is pointless, mediocre junk. It's like one long extended action sequence, poorly realized and frequently halted for nominal personal dramatics. It's a CGI spectacle that only Van Helsing could love, a rendered bitmap mess that doesn't understand the need for tactile stunt work. Instead, it lays on the greenscreen and ratchets up the motherboard, hoping to deliver some manner of escapist thrills. All it does manage to create is a lot of well-earned respect for original Adventure producer Irwin Allen and director Ronald Neame. What seemed like a cinematic no-brainer (the modernizing of a favored disaster film of the '70s with updated technology and abilities) ends up being the popcorn version of a lobotomy. Lacking anything even remotely related to suspense, empathy, excitement or heart, this Uwe Boll level horror commits so many sins against cinema that art form tribunals are currently being set up to evaluate the level of entertainment damage done. By the looks of it, the indictments will be flying fast and furious, and the eventual directorial death sentences will make Devil's Island look like a vacation in Valhalla.

It's amazing that Wolfgang Peterson was let anywhere near this project. After the critically acclaimed Das Boot in 1985, this flawed filmmaker's onscreen track record has been uneven at best. For every thoughtful, entertaining hit (In the Line of Fire, Air Force One), there have been uneven failures (The Perfect Storm, Troy) and outright flops (Outbreak, Enemy Mine). About the only good thing that came from the decision to let him handle the Poseidon Adventure remake is that it kept him away from the long rumored Superman/Batman movie. Peterson is one of the laziest directors in modern Hollywood. Not content to let physical effects control his destiny, he would rather pay umpteen mega-millions to ILM and other digital domains and animate his way out of the action. The computer work here is obvious and unimaginative. When the ship capsizes, the virtual camera crawls fore and aft, bow to stern capturing all the watery wave elements in detail so dense no human eye could possibly capture it all. This renders the F/X work incredibly fake and distracting. We spend so much time watching like animated victims drowning and dying that we forget we are supposed to be "thrilled" by this titanic tripe. Miniatures and other old school 'cheats' may have an aura of falseness to them, but at least they respond as nature, not a computer chip, had intended.

But the biggest mistake Poseidon makes is casting its characters out of the blandest of boring post-modern Tinsel Town talent. Oh sure, Kurt Russell and Oscar bait Richard Dreyfuss are on hand to remind us what acting really is, but the rest of the cast are cardboard cut-outs from a PR person's idea of fame. As a reluctant leader, Josh Lucas is a joke, a poorly defined professional gambler who shifts from ruthless to sentimental in the blink of a monotonous eye. Equally unimpressive are the rest of the survivors – everyone from ex-Real World waif Jacinda Barrett to Entourage's cocky Kevin Dillon. Let's face it, any film that gives the Black Eyed Pea's Fergie a role as the shipboard singer deserves to sink at the box office. This talentless tart has more screen time than Freddy Rodriguez and Andre Braugher combined. The original film was filled with Academy worthy names - Gene Hackman was handed his statuette during production, while Ernest Borgnine, Red Buttons, Shelley Winters and Jack Albertson all had their little gold men at home. Here, even with Dexter Reilly and Matt Hooper on board, we feel like we're watching a grade-Z version of the Love Boat, complete with a hip hop Charo.

Had we had a single individual to root for, had the script given any of the passengers a backstory – or a personality, for that matter – that we even began to care about, we might have been able to buy into the rest of this routine big screen bombast. As a rule, action films need ballast in order to support their larger than life histrionics. Without them, the spectacle grows stale, coming across as nothing more than expensive smoke and extremely misguided mirrors. But just as he did with The Perfect Storm, Peterson believes that the eye candy is Poseidon's only purpose. It's all about the money shot, the sequence where the glass elevator breaks and the animated victim falls to her splattery death or when the well-sealed ballroom becomes a torrent of in-rushing ocean. Without the proper set-up, you have to rely on the competency of the filmmaking and the freshness of the story/spectacle to work. Unfortunately, the previous version of this capsized cruise ship was expertly crafted to maximize both the humanity and the horror. But in the case of this redux, both of those elements are missing. Instead, we get an overdose of cinematic chicanery – and it's damn near lethal.

The Video:
Looking a little less detailed than in its theatrical presentation, Warner Brother's DVD release of Poseidon is still pretty good. The 2.35:1 anamorphic widescreen image is colorful and clean, though we do loose most of the encompassing atmosphere inherent in the big screen experience. Action never responds well to home theater elements, as downsizing destroys a lot of the imagery's impact. Still, in our sixth year beyond the millennium, we expect brand new Hollywood films to hold up well on the digital format. Poseidon does not disappoint, at least from a technical standpoint.

The Audio:
Warner Brothers provides us with an incredibly dense aural experience. The Dolby Digital Surround 5.1 mix is magnificent, loaded with directional and spatial elements and incorporating some subtle sonic shading as well. When we witness underwater shots of random explosions onboard ship, we feel their subdued power. Equally impressive are the off camera cues, the random noises of metal failing and fires flaring that remind us of the constant danger. Too bad the audio can't overcome the film's other far more massive flaws.

The Extras:
Remember all those stories, right around the time of the film's release into theaters, about Peterson's having to cut nearly 25 minutes of narrative out of the movie's first act. In response to audience surveys and preview screening results, all the character development, interpersonal posturing and potential emotional connections were apparently removed, in order to get to the catastrophe sooner. So, naturally, one would assume that these deleted scenes would be part of the DVD release, especially when you consider that Warners opts for a two disc presentation of Poseidon the first time around. Well, don't count your context before it arrives. There are no added sequences here, no director's cut fleshing out the flaccid narrative. What we do get as part of this package is the same slop that stunk up the local multiplex. No attempt to expand the film, no seamless branching to a collection of cut moments. Nope, the paltry bonus material offered here proves that Warners still has very little faith in this title. The supplements are almost exclusively EPK crap, with a History Channel documentary on rogue waves acting like an "I told you so" statement to the laughability of a specific line delivered in the film.

As for specifics, Disc 1 houses the illusory theatrical trailer and a look at the soundstage set-ups for the film. Showing how actors experienced the pleasure of playing in gallons of skunky wastewater to create the chimera of danger, the first documentary is a great deal of back slapping and chest puffing. Disc 2 delivers two more examples of this exasperation. First off is a look at how the ship sets were designed. In essence, they took a typical cruise ship, added a few "film friendly" elements, and flipped it over. Then they tweaked it a bit more and delivered the disaster. Duh! Next up, a foreign film student plays intern on the set of Poseidon, and lucky us, someone gave the gal a camera. It's YouTube level insights for nearly ten tedious minutes. Add in the Discovery like discourse on the reality of rogue waves (okay, okay, we believe they exists – can we go now???) and there you have it. No commentary by Peterson or the cast. No tribute to the original or its creators. While not literally bare bones due to the amount of material here, this is a cheap collection of complements that add nothing to the Poseidon picture.

Final Thoughts:
If you've seen the original and found it to be cool if campy fun, if you are one of the few fools who sat through the equally insipid four hour TV remake from last year (featuring Rutger Hauer, Peter Weller and Steve Guttenberg as an adulterous husband?!?!) there is really no reason to sit through this revamp. Nothing except the technology changes in the logistical story of what happens to the Poseidon on that notorious New Year's Eve. Granted, the explosions are more impressive and the old fashioned luxuries of a simple ocean liner have been turned into an escapist EPCOT, complete with indoor/outdoor pools and skyscraper like amenities. But at the heart of the 1972 epic was a central theme of people overcoming obstacles, individuals putting their fears and their flaws aside to take a stand against the ever-present death around them. Sadly, 34 years later, that's all gone. In its place are tacky technical tricks. Easily earning a Skip It, Poseidon delivers nothing except cinematic shame and entertainment embarrassment. It should be left at the bottom of the ocean, where it belongs.

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