The Poseidon Adventure (2005)

Who's In It: Adam Baldwin (Firefly, Chuck), Rutger Hauer (Bladerunner, The Hitcher), Steve Guttenberg (Police Academy), C Thomas Howell (Red Dawn, The Hitcher), and Alex Kingston (Doctor Who)

What It’s About: Terrorist activity flips over an ocean liner, forcing passengers to make their way up towards the former bottom of the ship where they hope to find rescue.

How It Is: As much as I liked the original Poseidon Adventure, I don’t think that remaking it into a three-hour miniseries is necessarily a doomed proposition. Making the disaster the result of terrorism is a valid way to update the plot and while the original didn’t need more pre-disaster time with its characters, I imagine that there’s a way to do that without hurting the overall story. It’s just too bad that Hallmark/NBC didn’t figure out what that was.

I haven’t read the novel that the original was based on, so I don’t know how much of Hallmark’s version is a new adaptation of the book and how much is a remake of the earlier film. There are a few characters and set pieces that are the same in both movies, but that doesn’t tell me anything. I’m going to refer to it as a remake, but that may or may not be accurate, depending on how you define it. But wherever you come down on that, the 2005 version is sadly a shadow of the 1972 one.

The characters are an easy way to compare the two. A priest still acts as one of the leaders of the escape group, but instead of Gene Hackman’s unorthodox minister to the strong, Rutger Hauer’s character is written as a conventional, if surprisingly actiony clergyman. Hauer does an excellent job with the role and there are moments that remind me of the emotional depth of his work in Bladerunner, so it’s not a bad character by any means. He’s just not written as provocatively as Hackman’s version.

Another example is the pair of unaccompanied minors from the original. In 2005, they’re very much accompanied by bickering parents who have scheduled the cruise as part of marriage therapy. When Mom (soap star Alexa Hamilton) turns the voyage into a working trip, Dad (Guttenberg) retaliates by having an affair with the ship’s unbelievably forward massage therapist (Nathalie Boltt from Doomsday and District 9). In the original, there’s a great dynamic between the kids as they try to take care of each other, but the miniseries turns their story into a tired drama about an affair.

The miniseries almost finds a way to give that plot life by having Guttenberg and Boltt’s characters in bed when the disaster strikes, so that they have to travel together to find Guttenberg’s family. There’s some great awkwardness in that situation and it ramps up even more once they find the family and everyone has to figure out what to do now that they’re forced to survive together. Unfortunately, all that tension is let off earlier than I wanted when one of the members of the triangle conveniently dies.

Deaths are a problem in the miniseries. Where the deaths in the ’72 version all felt random and real, too many in ’05 feel like they’re just tying up plot threads. I won’t spoil anything by mentioning specific examples, but in spite of the extra time we get with these characters, their lives feel cheaper in the miniseries.

The worst thing the remake does to one of the original characters concerns the purser who encourages passengers to stay in the ballroom and wait for rescue. In ’72, he’s well-meaning, but misguided, and there’s believable tension as people have to make the choice between the ballroom and venturing into unknown territory with Gene Hackman. The miniseries removes all ambiguity about that decision though. The purser doesn’t just have an obnoxious personality, he’s a bona fide villain who’s been stealing painkillers from the ship’s doctor and is now hoarding them from injured people while stridently insisting on being in charge. He’s a ridiculous, moustache twirling cartoon of a character.

One character that actually improves in the remake though is Adam Baldwin’s Mike Rogo (played in ’72 by Ernest Borgnine). Instead of a cop, he’s a sea marshal who’s directly responsible for the safety of the passengers and crew. The miniseries goes too far by piling an offscreen, troubled marriage onto him in addition to his immediate problems, but Baldwin’s great as the glowering authority figure, especially when he’s playing against Hauer’s more gentle leadership.

As long as I’m mentioning Hauer again, the miniseries’ biggest crime is putting him in the same movie with C Thomas Howell (who plays the ship’s doctor) and never allowing them to revisit their chemistry from The Hitcher. I fantasized about some kind of cheesy acknowledgment between their two characters, but I would’ve been thrilled with just a meaningful scene featuring them. They barely interact at all.

Other than the characters, the miniseries’ biggest problem is trying to fill time with an outside rescue mission. The ’72 film kept a lot of tension by leaving the characters in the dark about whether or not there actually was rescue for them if they made it to their destination. The ’05 miniseries shows every step of that operation. But I don’t miss that extra tension as much as I just resent being pulled away from the main action to watch people in control rooms talk about how they’re trying to get a SEAL team to the Poseidon before it goes under.

It helps that one of the main coordinators of the rescue is Alex Kingston, but her character is as frustrating as she is fun to watch. As the miniseries ends and everyone is celebrating the rescue of the survivors, she can’t participate because she’s too upset over the thousands who weren’t saved. That’s a valid thing to be distressed about, but it’s also a weird, anticlimactic moment when she’s completely unappreciative of the very thing the rest of the story has been about: the survival of this small group of people. Because the story has been so distracted with easy villains and plot-ordained deaths, it hasn’t spent enough time representing the human tragedy that should have permeated the entire story. So it tacks this on at the end as a sloppy reminder.

Rating: Two out of five Father Battys.

The Poseidon Adventure (1972)

Who’s In It: Gene Hackman (Unforgiven), Ernest Borgnine (Escape from New York), Shelley Winters (The Night of the Hunter), Red Buttons (Pete’s Dragon), and Pamela Sue Martin (The Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew Mysteries)

What It’s About: An ocean liner flips over when hit by a tidal wave, forcing a small group of passengers to make their way up towards the bottom of the ship where they hope to find rescue.

How It Is: I watched this as a kid and hated it. I don’t know if it was my first disaster movie or what, but I had a hard time watching a large cast of characters get whittled down to a handful. Not that my memory of it is at all faithful, because I could have sworn that certain characters lived when I’ve just seen that they didn’t.

More than simply refreshing my memory though, I’m glad I gave it another shot as an adult because it’s a heck of a movie. A lot of people die, but it’s not the disaster porn that modern filmmakers like Roland Emmerich, Michael Bay, and Zack Snyder are famous for. The deaths in Poseidon Adventure are meaningful, from the biggest of its stars to the most nameless background character. There’s not a ton of sobbing and wailing over every single character of course, but the movie made me feel the weight of all the death. It means something that these people are perishing, which makes it even more important to see some of them survive.

Most of the main characters have something that kept me invested in their continued existence. Ernest Borgnine's grouchy cop is probably my least favorite, but even then I couldn't help but love his devotion to his wife, a former prostitute played by Stella Stevens. She has less to do, but still contributes to the weirdly sweet relationship. Easier to like are the brother and sister played by Pamela Sue Martin and Eric Shea. They're unaccompanied minors who do a lot of bickering before the disaster, but immediately drop that to take care of each other.

Also very sweet are Shelley Winters and Jack Albertson as an older couple on their way to see their grandchild for the first time. I'm always a fan of the affable Albertson and this is one of my favorite Winters roles. She's constantly concerned that her weight is going to be a problem in the escape, but she's so courageously game to try that I fell quickly in love with her.

Red Buttons is equally lovely as a supposed bachelor who's never found time for love, but takes a young singer (Carol Lynley) under his protection. I say "supposed" because though he never admits it explicitly, he's got a line that implies he knows what it means to lose someone close to him. That could be a parent or sibling, but I like to think that he's a widower who finds it easier to pretend he's never been married than to talk about his deceased wife. Either way, it's wonderful that his relationship with the singer never turns creepy. I never got the sense that he's helping her because he's attracted to her. He just seems to genuinely care about her and goes to great lengths to make sure she's okay.

The most fascinating character though is Gene Hackman's unorthodox priest. The movie reveals early that Hackman's a believer in the adage, "God helps those who help themselves." That's not a Biblical quote and I'm not even convinced it's supportable theology, but the film never actually claims that it is. Hackman makes an excellent point about taking action versus expecting God to do everything for you, but there's a powerful scene that calls his point of view into question.

After the wave hits, most of the passengers elect to stay in the ballroom and hope for rescue. Hackman's convinced that it's a doomed proposition and desperately wants his old friend the chaplain to come with him. He gives his usual speech about taking action, but the chaplain points out that Hackman's gospel only helps those who are already strong. The chaplain sees his role as ministering to the weak, which strikes me as the definition of strength. As much as Hackman preaches about strength and action, he comes at it from a place of fear and his adventure up into the bowels of the ship brings that out in a potent way. The chaplain on the other hand stays in the ballroom not because he's afraid, but because he knows that he's needed there. The film never explicitly judges either man (and to be perfectly fair, Hackman does save some people who would've been doomed without him), but offers them in contrast to each other and it's a beautiful, provocative juxtaposition.

The Poseidon Adventure isn't quite making me want to dig out The Towering Inferno and Airport to re-evaluate '70s disaster movies as a genre, but it's a much deeper - pun intended - movie than I expected. Makes me want to watch its sequel and remakes for comparison.

Rating: Four out of five soggy Nancy Drews.