Poseidon (film)

The RMS Poseidon, a British luxury ocean liner, is making a transatlantic crossing from London To New York City. Former New York City Mayor and firefighter Robert Ramsey is traveling with his daughter Jennifer and her boyfriend Christian Sanders to New York, soon to be engaged. Also on board are former Navy submariner-turned-professional gambler Dylan Johns, architect Richard Nelson, Maggie James with her son Conor, stowaway Elena Morales, her boyfriend and waiter Marco Valentine, singer Gloria, and Captain Michael Bradford. As the passengers are celebrating a New Year's Eve party, officers on the bridge see a huge rogue wave heading towards the ship. To survive the wave, they try to steer the ship to starboard to take the wave bow-first, but she does not turn fast enough. The wave swamps and capsizes the ship, killing the bridge officers along with most passengers and crew. In the ballroom, a badly injured Captain Bradford attempts to restore order and assures the surviving passengers that emergency beacons were launched and rescue is on the way within several hours, persuading them to stay put. Unconvinced, Dylan leads Conor, Maggie, Robert, Richard, and Valentine towards the bow, where he believes they will have the best chance of escaping the capsized liner. On their way to the bow, they encounter a lift shaft. When Richard and Valentine are attempting to reach the entertainment section, the bridge they are crossing onto loses balance and falls leading to Valentine hanging from Richard's leg. Dylan urges Richard to kick Valentine off to save his own life; Valentine falls and is killed below. They reunite with Jennifer, Christian, Elena, and gambler Lucky Larry, in the nightclub, and are the only survivors out of all of the occupants who had been electrocuted to death by mangled live wires. The group crosses the fallen lift shaft across the flooded lobby, where Larry gets crushed by an AC chiller. The pressure from the water due to the ship's prolonged submersion causes the ballroom windows to fail, breaking and drowning the occupants, including Captain Bradford and Gloria. With the ship sinking rapidly, the group escapes through a ventilation shaft and a couple ballast tanks, although Elena hits her head in an underwater passageway and drowns. The survivors make their way to a crew lounge, where they find the bow section is flooded and unpassable, until multiple explosions in the engine room floods the stern, lifting it out of the water. They enter the bow thruster room and are horrified to find the thrusters still running. With their path blocked by the propellers, and the control room submerged, Robert swims away to turn off the engine. He finds the "shut off" switch to be broken, but presses the reverse button instead, before drowning. With the propellers now spinning in the opposite direction, Dylan throws an acetylene tank into it, causing an explosion that destroys both of them, and leaving an opening to the outside world for them to escape through. The group jumps out the thruster room and swims to a nearby inflatable raft, just before the ship flips back over, and across the water. The six survivors look on as she sinks stern-first to the bottom of the ocean. After the survivors fire a flare, two helicopters and several ships arrive at the area to rescue them, having tracked the location of the Poseidons GPS beacon. ==Cast==

In February 2004, it was reported that Wolfgang Petersen and producer Mike Fleiss were teaming up do a new adaptation of Paul Gallico's The Poseidon Adventure which had previously been adapted in 1972 for Warner Bros. Pictures. The film came about due to both Fleiss and Petersen being interested in a remake of The Poseidon Adventure with Fleiss being a fan of the original film and Petersen feeling with the advancements in computer-generated imagery and the success of his own The Perfect Storm that the time was right for a remake. In June of that year, it was reported that the screenplay had been written by Mark Protosevich and Akiva Goldsman, and Kurt Russell, Richard Dreyfuss, and Emmy Rossum had been cast in the film. Warner Bros. executive, Alan F. Horn, helped push the film forward through development as he thought the combination of impressive effects and Petersen's direction would lead to similar success experienced by 20th Century Fox when they released The Day After Tomorrow, but according to various insiders, the script had problems that led to it going through multiple rewrites and proved challenging in signing major names to the cast. Production on the film began in July 2005. Sets As with the 1972 The Poseidon Adventure film, which based many of its sets on rooms aboard the RMS Queen Mary, the film's set designers drew inspiration for some of the spaces and the exterior aboard the fictional "Poseidon" from rooms aboard RMS Queen Mary 2, most notably in Poseidon's ballroom, which is partly modeled from the dining room on Queen Mary 2. On the soundstage at Warner Bros. Studios, Burbank in California, two sets for each main room were built, one right-side-up and the other upside down. The upside-down ballroom was built on top of a large water tank in the soundstage so it could be flooded and drained in a matter of hours. The interior and exterior shots of the ship rolling were constructed with computer-generated imagery. Visual effects The primary visual effects were completed by Industrial Light & Magic and Moving Picture Company. ILM used the most advanced version of mental ray to photorealistically light and render the shots, and was responsible for all of the ship's exterior shots. The most complicated work was the opening shot of the ship, where the camera tours the ship's exterior. It lasts for two and a half minutes, and featured one of the most complex digital models ILM had ever created. For water simulations, proprietary software known as PhysBAM was used, created in collaboration with Stanford University. Harold "Howie" Weed was the film's computer graphics modeler. Digital interiors and water effects were created by MPC, while liquid and gaseous effects were simulated with Scanline VFX proprietary software Flowline. Other shots were done by CIS Hollywood, with water effects simulated using RealFlow. ==Soundtrack==

The soundtrack was released on May 9, 2006, and includes music composed by Klaus Badelt, as well as songs performed by Fergie, who played the character Gloria in the film, and by Federico Aubele. "Be Without You (Moto Blanco Vocal Mix)" (8:44) by Mary J. Blige is played in the first nightclub scene but was not included on the soundtrack. ==Reception==

Box office It grossed $22,155,410 on its opening weekend, for an average of $6,232 from 3,555 theaters, finishing in second place behind Mission: Impossible III. It eventually earned $60,674,817 in the United States and $121,000,000 in foreign markets, for a total gross of $181,674,817. Critical response On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, Poseidon has a score of 33% based on 204 reviews, with an average rating of 4.8/10. The consensus reads: "This remake of The Poseidon Adventure delivers dazzling special effects. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem that any of the budget was left over to devote to the script". On Metacritic, which assesses films on a score out of 100, Poseidon has a rating of 50 based on 36 reviews, indicating "mixed or average reviews". Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave it an average grade "B" on an A+ to F scale. Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times wrote, "Petersen's heart isn't in it. He is too wise a director to think this is first-rate material, and too good a director to turn it into enjoyable trash." In a two out of four review, Jon Niccum of Lawrence Journal-World described it as "the cinematic equivalent of a Carnival Cruise." Brian Lowry of Variety wrote, "Wolfgang Petersen's large-scale liner moves reasonably well, though anyone with the faintest memory of its 1972 predecessor will wonder where most of the plot went, and the dialogue is so stilted it can honestly be said the less the better." == Accolades ==

The film was also nominated for the Golden Raspberry Award for Worst Remake or Ripoff, losing to Little Man. However, it was commended for its realistic use of CGI in the capsizing scenes and nominated for the Academy Award for Best Visual Effects, losing to ''Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest''. ==Home media==

Poseidon was released to DVD on August 22, 2006, in both single-disc and double-disc editions as well as Full-Screen and Widescreen formats and contains a behind-the-scenes featurette and the theatrical trailer. The 2-disc special edition expands on two bonus features, and also includes the documentaries Poseidon: Upside Down: A Unique Set Design Chronicle; ''A Shipmate's Diary'', which covers a film school intern's experience on the set; and a History Channel documentary which explores rogue waves. Domestic DVD sales for Poseidon were $27,196,438. ==See also==