Poseidon
The most unrealistic part of this Towering Inferno semi-remake is that Josh Lucas is the actual bonafide lead, credited before Kurt motherfucking Russell, Snake Plissken himself.
Not everyone. The big hero is the former Navy seaman turned phoney poker bounty hunter, a cat burglar working with cards. There’s also the single mum and the mildly annoying kid. The gay architect is also one of the big cheeses, the rich guys. On the blue blood side, there’s the Rudy Giuliani, his daughter and her longtime boyfriend, who still hides from her dad, due to the whole “sex before marriage” being a sin. The Help does not heed this warning, so they die.
It’s pretty puking. The Help is the first one to keel over (he he he), no matter how many crosses the stowaway woman clutches. The gay architect got the bulk of the trauma, first he kicks the guy into the elevator shaft, then he fails to save the woman he was smuggling for sexual purposes.
The gay guy was even about to kill himself, after being dumped by his boyfriend. Poured cold water on that. At first I though they were an item, and the architect would have to tell her he murdered her sweetheart, but it was just transactional prostitution.
They say this is a disaster film, but it’s actually a slasher, very Christian. The whore and her john die, the mother with the kid survive, because she only flirts with the hero, and the young kids also survive because they hold on the fucking before marriage.
This is strictly worse than the other Wolfgang Petersen film about a big wave leading to death and disgrace, The Perfect Storm. Somebody must have hated Josh Lucas too, he never did anything else.
Going on a cruise is already an horrible experience, akin to being in jail in the middle of the ocean, but then disaster strikes, gets even worse.
Just like Costa Concordia, the captain tells everyone to stay in the big room, where everyone dies horribly.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.