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Poseidon (HD DVD)
Warner Bros. // PG-13 // January 16, 2007 // Region 0
List Price: $28.99 [Buy now and save at Amazon]
The money shot in Poseidon is a scene with a rogue wave swiftly and brutally capsizing a mammoth thirteen-deck cruise liner. I've heard it shrugged off as disaster-porn, but those were five of the most gleefully destructive minutes I've ever seen on film. It's all in chapter five, if you wind up renting this HD DVD and want to skip straight to the good stuff. You can pretty safely mash the 'Eject' button and get the disc back on its way to Netflix after that.
The plot boils down to a sprawling luxury
cruise liner being smacked by a 120 foot wave and its few survivors wading through the twisted wreckage in the hope of finding a way out of the sinking ship. There's no backstory. There's really not any characterization. In a way, that's what Poseidon does best: the rogue wave hits the ship at the fifteen minute mark, and from there, it strings together one perilous setpiece after another without ever pausing to catch its breath for its lean hour and a half runtime.
In an era of bloated, self-indulgent action flicks, I would usually appreciate a movie that strips the premise down to bare metal and darts headfirst for 90 minutes. It's just that in a disaster flick, either give me (1) characters with enough personality that I want to see at least some of 'em make it to the end credits or (2) come up with a cacklingly brutal way to up the body count. Poseidon doesn't pull either off particularly well.
Its characters are all one-note, and the sentence or two devoted to their backstories never comes into play: Kurt Russell plays a former fireman with a disastrously brief stint as the mayor of New York (?), Emmy Rossum is his younger daughter who doesn't do anything more than stand there and try not to spill out of her tight-fitting top, Mike Vogel is her nearly as bland fiancé, Josh Lucas is the former Navy man who leads the trek, Jacinda Barrett is the hottie mommy with a mildly annoying kid in tow, Richard Dreyfuss is old, gay, and suicidal, Kevin Dillon is a loudmouthed jackass who's marked for death from word one, and Mia Maestro and Freddy Rodriguez are Hispanic stereotypes just one bee suit and a "no me gusta!" away from a character on The Simpsons.
I'm sure Wolfgang Petersen would just have soon have tossed out the actors: the visual effects were the star of The Perfect Storm, a movie whose poster art was shamelessly nicked for Poseidon and I'm sure the one and only reason Petersen landed this directing gig, and the effects and set design are really the only things to appreciate here too. The characters are there just to make it from one claustrophobic
action sequence to the next and to periodically die off, and if you've seen enough disaster flicks, you know that the unredeemable asshole will be knocked off early on, that there'll be a heroic sacrifice near the end, and a couple of sweet but flawed characters will meet a grisly end along the way.
It's just that of the main characters, the body count is kind of slim, and there are only two gruesome deaths. One is preceded by such rambling, hysterically ham-fisted, raving-prick dialogue that you're just waiting for something large and ungainly to flatten him (and it does), and the only really tense sequence involves a couple of characters barely hanging on in an elevator shaft as fiery wreckage is on the verge of flattening them into jagged metal a few dozen feet below. The rest of the action is reasonably well-executed but awfully routine. I liked the way the sinking of the ship added a ticking clock to the search for a way out, but the stilted dialogue, anemic characterization, and just a handful of really suspenseful moments didn't leave me with much else to hold my attention. Oh well. At least it's short.
Video: An effects spectacle with a production budget north of $150 million ought to rank higher than "okay, I guess" on HD DVD, but this 1080p scope presentation of Poseidon is surprisingly underwhelming. It's slightly soft, falling a good bit short of the detail and definition offered by most of the recent theatrical releases that have made their way onto the format. Contrast seems somewhat flat as well, and it doesn't have that three-dimensional pop of the most eye-catching HD DVDs. The bulk of Poseidon is set either in the steely gray innards of the ship or ornately decorated rooms with lamps that cast everyone and everything in a muddy gold. I'm sure this was an intentional aesthetic choice, but it keeps the palette looking fairly subdued throughout much of the film. Some colors do look fantastic, though, particularly the mingling of blood and water in the home stretch.
Poseidon must've been a beast to compress, teeming with frayed, sparking wires, flickering flames, and strobing lights. I'm sure it'll be a mess when the movie inevitably rears its head on cable and satellite, but I couldn't spot any artifacting or compression hiccups on this HD DVD. Presumably minted from a digital intermediate, this transfer doesn't show any signs of speckling or wear either.
Poseidon doesn't look disappointing on HD DVD, and I'm sure it's a considerable step up from the somewhat poorly-received DVD released at the tail end of last year. It's just that there are dozens of truly spectacular titles floating around, and a mega-budgeted summer tentpole that merely looks alright feels like a bit of letdown. Not bad, but with so few shots that coaxed much of a "wow!" from me, it's certainly not great.
Audio: Poseidon got a nod from the Academy for its extensive special effects work, but it really should've been nominated for Best Sound Design. Much like the movie's visual effects, its lossless Dolby TrueHD 5.1 audio is the most impressive in Poseidon's only standout sequence, the collision with the rogue wave. Chaos roars from every direction: the screams of hapless passengers as they're flung around like rag dolls, the din of seawater rushing through shattered windows, the colliding thud of furniture tossed around a capsized cruise ship, creaking metal, electrical sparks, and explosions. The collision with the wave itself and the resulting tumult are also accompanied by devastatingly thunderous bass. The rest of the movie understandably isn't nearly as aggressive, but there's a consistently healthy low-end, and the sound design remains
immersive as the survivors skulk around the skeleton of the shattered ship. Very impressive.
Along with the TrueHD audio, Poseidon also offers subtitles and Dolby Digital Plus 5.1 audio in English, Quebecois-French, and Spanish.
Supplements: This HD DVD ports over the handful of extras from the two-disc special edition DVD and adds one of the best In Movie Experiences to date. However, none of the carryovers are offered in high definition, and the trailer is the only one presented in anamorphic widescreen.
The 23 minute "Poseidon: A Ship on a Soundstage" is a considerably above-average making-of piece, not playing like the usual extended trailer-plus-Entertainment Tonight-grade talking head interviews on most DVDs. With an extensive variety of participants, the featurette covers pre-production churning along while the script was still being hammered out, one of the most ambitious and costly shots ever committed to film, the unconventional choices to shoot a movie in order of continuity and with five cameras continually rolling, striving for realism by actually flooding the sets and having the actors perform as many of their own stunts as possible, and the sheer scale of this kind of production.
The disc also includes two other making-of featurettes. The first is a 12 minute diary by Wolfgang Petersen's assistant and recent film school grad Malona Voigt, spending most of its time focusing on the typically unseen faces behind the scenes as well as Petersen's rating scale for 11 AM soups. It goes a little overboard with comparisons between a student film and a $160 million summer action flick, but Voigt does make an effort to cover aspects of production most featurettes don't bother with, and I did enjoy that perspective. Cute, but not essential viewing.
The last of the production featurettes is an 11 minute look at the film's set design, particularly the challenges involved with constructing dozens upon dozens of sets that are completely upside down, still somewhat safe for the cast and crew to operate in, and able to withstand the abuse of thousands of gallons of water. Short, fast, informative, and entertaining.
A History Channel special on rogue waves, running half an hour and clearly produced to ride Poseidon's theatrical coattails, is also included. The special focuses on these mammoth waves, long dismissed as fanciful tales or excuses to cover up poor seamanship until the past 25 years or so. The narration is as overdramatic as an Irwin Allen disaster flick, and the tail end is devoted to how realistic Wolfgang Petersen's big-budget remake of The Poseidon Adventure is. There are some detailed comments about what causes these waves, the frequency with which they appear, and how naval engineers and scientists are trying to best accomodate, but the special seems less concerned about science and history and more interested in ominous soundbites to try to get people to shell out $8 to see Poseidon.
The last of the extras lifted
from the original DVD set is a standard definition theatrical trailer.
The In Movie Experience, which at least for the time being is exclusive to this release, trumps all of the extras from the DVD, and I'm sorely tempted to say that it's the best use of this type of interactivity I've seen on HD DVD. Almost all of these picture-in-picture commentaries are riddled with dead air, often only having enough material to cover half of a movie's runtime; Poseidon's has very few gaps and runs pretty steadily throughout. Hosted by Josh Lucas, much of this generally screen-specific commentary was culled together from outtakes of interviews shot for the "A Ship on a Soundstage" featurette. A couple of brief comments appear in both extras, but the overwhelming majority of this footage is unique and again includes comments from a wide assortment of producers, actors, and technical staff. All of the key details from the making-of featurette are covered, rendering it redundant if you have time to give the IME a look, and it also covers such aspects of production as scanning extras in 3D for added color in the effects sequences, the appeal of using miniatures over CGI when appropriate, establishing the proper tone for the movie in the wake of so many real-life disasters, and the physical demands of shooting this kind of movie. A small window in the bottom-left of the screen also shows early CG renderings and other behind the scenes footage, and captions periodically appear to add some additional notes. Just as Universal's HD DVDs of The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift and Miami Vice charted its heroes' progress across those cities, Poseidon tracks its characters as they claw through the guts of the capsized ship. This HD DVD was delayed for several months after it was first announced, and if that time was spent polishing the In Movie Experience, it was worth the wait.
Conclusion: Poseidon is a technical marvel, boasting outstanding set design and thoroughly impressive water effects, and it may have been a worthwhile movie if anywhere near that same effort had been invested in hammering out a passable script. If you don't care if the characters live or die and can't muster enough creativity to at least knock them off inventively, who cares if the upside-down sets look neat or how realistic the digitally-rendered water is? Rent It.
The usual disclaimer: the pictures scattered around this review are from promotional stills and don't necessarily reflect the way Poseidon looks on HD DVD.
The plot boils down to a sprawling luxury
cruise liner being smacked by a 120 foot wave and its few survivors wading through the twisted wreckage in the hope of finding a way out of the sinking ship. There's no backstory. There's really not any characterization. In a way, that's what Poseidon does best: the rogue wave hits the ship at the fifteen minute mark, and from there, it strings together one perilous setpiece after another without ever pausing to catch its breath for its lean hour and a half runtime. In an era of bloated, self-indulgent action flicks, I would usually appreciate a movie that strips the premise down to bare metal and darts headfirst for 90 minutes. It's just that in a disaster flick, either give me (1) characters with enough personality that I want to see at least some of 'em make it to the end credits or (2) come up with a cacklingly brutal way to up the body count. Poseidon doesn't pull either off particularly well.
Its characters are all one-note, and the sentence or two devoted to their backstories never comes into play: Kurt Russell plays a former fireman with a disastrously brief stint as the mayor of New York (?), Emmy Rossum is his younger daughter who doesn't do anything more than stand there and try not to spill out of her tight-fitting top, Mike Vogel is her nearly as bland fiancé, Josh Lucas is the former Navy man who leads the trek, Jacinda Barrett is the hottie mommy with a mildly annoying kid in tow, Richard Dreyfuss is old, gay, and suicidal, Kevin Dillon is a loudmouthed jackass who's marked for death from word one, and Mia Maestro and Freddy Rodriguez are Hispanic stereotypes just one bee suit and a "no me gusta!" away from a character on The Simpsons.
I'm sure Wolfgang Petersen would just have soon have tossed out the actors: the visual effects were the star of The Perfect Storm, a movie whose poster art was shamelessly nicked for Poseidon and I'm sure the one and only reason Petersen landed this directing gig, and the effects and set design are really the only things to appreciate here too. The characters are there just to make it from one claustrophobic
action sequence to the next and to periodically die off, and if you've seen enough disaster flicks, you know that the unredeemable asshole will be knocked off early on, that there'll be a heroic sacrifice near the end, and a couple of sweet but flawed characters will meet a grisly end along the way. It's just that of the main characters, the body count is kind of slim, and there are only two gruesome deaths. One is preceded by such rambling, hysterically ham-fisted, raving-prick dialogue that you're just waiting for something large and ungainly to flatten him (and it does), and the only really tense sequence involves a couple of characters barely hanging on in an elevator shaft as fiery wreckage is on the verge of flattening them into jagged metal a few dozen feet below. The rest of the action is reasonably well-executed but awfully routine. I liked the way the sinking of the ship added a ticking clock to the search for a way out, but the stilted dialogue, anemic characterization, and just a handful of really suspenseful moments didn't leave me with much else to hold my attention. Oh well. At least it's short.
Video: An effects spectacle with a production budget north of $150 million ought to rank higher than "okay, I guess" on HD DVD, but this 1080p scope presentation of Poseidon is surprisingly underwhelming. It's slightly soft, falling a good bit short of the detail and definition offered by most of the recent theatrical releases that have made their way onto the format. Contrast seems somewhat flat as well, and it doesn't have that three-dimensional pop of the most eye-catching HD DVDs. The bulk of Poseidon is set either in the steely gray innards of the ship or ornately decorated rooms with lamps that cast everyone and everything in a muddy gold. I'm sure this was an intentional aesthetic choice, but it keeps the palette looking fairly subdued throughout much of the film. Some colors do look fantastic, though, particularly the mingling of blood and water in the home stretch.
Poseidon must've been a beast to compress, teeming with frayed, sparking wires, flickering flames, and strobing lights. I'm sure it'll be a mess when the movie inevitably rears its head on cable and satellite, but I couldn't spot any artifacting or compression hiccups on this HD DVD. Presumably minted from a digital intermediate, this transfer doesn't show any signs of speckling or wear either.
Poseidon doesn't look disappointing on HD DVD, and I'm sure it's a considerable step up from the somewhat poorly-received DVD released at the tail end of last year. It's just that there are dozens of truly spectacular titles floating around, and a mega-budgeted summer tentpole that merely looks alright feels like a bit of letdown. Not bad, but with so few shots that coaxed much of a "wow!" from me, it's certainly not great.
Audio: Poseidon got a nod from the Academy for its extensive special effects work, but it really should've been nominated for Best Sound Design. Much like the movie's visual effects, its lossless Dolby TrueHD 5.1 audio is the most impressive in Poseidon's only standout sequence, the collision with the rogue wave. Chaos roars from every direction: the screams of hapless passengers as they're flung around like rag dolls, the din of seawater rushing through shattered windows, the colliding thud of furniture tossed around a capsized cruise ship, creaking metal, electrical sparks, and explosions. The collision with the wave itself and the resulting tumult are also accompanied by devastatingly thunderous bass. The rest of the movie understandably isn't nearly as aggressive, but there's a consistently healthy low-end, and the sound design remains
immersive as the survivors skulk around the skeleton of the shattered ship. Very impressive. Along with the TrueHD audio, Poseidon also offers subtitles and Dolby Digital Plus 5.1 audio in English, Quebecois-French, and Spanish.
Supplements: This HD DVD ports over the handful of extras from the two-disc special edition DVD and adds one of the best In Movie Experiences to date. However, none of the carryovers are offered in high definition, and the trailer is the only one presented in anamorphic widescreen.
The 23 minute "Poseidon: A Ship on a Soundstage" is a considerably above-average making-of piece, not playing like the usual extended trailer-plus-Entertainment Tonight-grade talking head interviews on most DVDs. With an extensive variety of participants, the featurette covers pre-production churning along while the script was still being hammered out, one of the most ambitious and costly shots ever committed to film, the unconventional choices to shoot a movie in order of continuity and with five cameras continually rolling, striving for realism by actually flooding the sets and having the actors perform as many of their own stunts as possible, and the sheer scale of this kind of production.
The disc also includes two other making-of featurettes. The first is a 12 minute diary by Wolfgang Petersen's assistant and recent film school grad Malona Voigt, spending most of its time focusing on the typically unseen faces behind the scenes as well as Petersen's rating scale for 11 AM soups. It goes a little overboard with comparisons between a student film and a $160 million summer action flick, but Voigt does make an effort to cover aspects of production most featurettes don't bother with, and I did enjoy that perspective. Cute, but not essential viewing.
The last of the production featurettes is an 11 minute look at the film's set design, particularly the challenges involved with constructing dozens upon dozens of sets that are completely upside down, still somewhat safe for the cast and crew to operate in, and able to withstand the abuse of thousands of gallons of water. Short, fast, informative, and entertaining.
A History Channel special on rogue waves, running half an hour and clearly produced to ride Poseidon's theatrical coattails, is also included. The special focuses on these mammoth waves, long dismissed as fanciful tales or excuses to cover up poor seamanship until the past 25 years or so. The narration is as overdramatic as an Irwin Allen disaster flick, and the tail end is devoted to how realistic Wolfgang Petersen's big-budget remake of The Poseidon Adventure is. There are some detailed comments about what causes these waves, the frequency with which they appear, and how naval engineers and scientists are trying to best accomodate, but the special seems less concerned about science and history and more interested in ominous soundbites to try to get people to shell out $8 to see Poseidon.
The last of the extras lifted
from the original DVD set is a standard definition theatrical trailer. The In Movie Experience, which at least for the time being is exclusive to this release, trumps all of the extras from the DVD, and I'm sorely tempted to say that it's the best use of this type of interactivity I've seen on HD DVD. Almost all of these picture-in-picture commentaries are riddled with dead air, often only having enough material to cover half of a movie's runtime; Poseidon's has very few gaps and runs pretty steadily throughout. Hosted by Josh Lucas, much of this generally screen-specific commentary was culled together from outtakes of interviews shot for the "A Ship on a Soundstage" featurette. A couple of brief comments appear in both extras, but the overwhelming majority of this footage is unique and again includes comments from a wide assortment of producers, actors, and technical staff. All of the key details from the making-of featurette are covered, rendering it redundant if you have time to give the IME a look, and it also covers such aspects of production as scanning extras in 3D for added color in the effects sequences, the appeal of using miniatures over CGI when appropriate, establishing the proper tone for the movie in the wake of so many real-life disasters, and the physical demands of shooting this kind of movie. A small window in the bottom-left of the screen also shows early CG renderings and other behind the scenes footage, and captions periodically appear to add some additional notes. Just as Universal's HD DVDs of The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift and Miami Vice charted its heroes' progress across those cities, Poseidon tracks its characters as they claw through the guts of the capsized ship. This HD DVD was delayed for several months after it was first announced, and if that time was spent polishing the In Movie Experience, it was worth the wait.
Conclusion: Poseidon is a technical marvel, boasting outstanding set design and thoroughly impressive water effects, and it may have been a worthwhile movie if anywhere near that same effort had been invested in hammering out a passable script. If you don't care if the characters live or die and can't muster enough creativity to at least knock them off inventively, who cares if the upside-down sets look neat or how realistic the digitally-rendered water is? Rent It.
The usual disclaimer: the pictures scattered around this review are from promotional stills and don't necessarily reflect the way Poseidon looks on HD DVD.
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