Poseidon 4K 2006

One of Hollywood's two leading deep-sea directors, Wolfgang Petersen, has decided to dive into the homeless depths of the world's oceans for the third time in his career. As is well known, his first dive was outstanding in every respect, while the second was significantly less successful, but at least it featured George Clooney, who brought his charisma to bear in all the right places. On his journey to the sea god, Petersen decided to follow the path already laid out.

First, Mark Protosevich paid tribute to the 1972 film while also creating the most stereotypical characters for such films: a young, cool loner; an aging tough guy with a beautiful daughter; the beautiful daughter's fiancé, who can't say a word to his future bride, let alone his future tough father-in-law; a beautiful woman with a child; another beautiful girl; some waiter who will be the first to die; and, for the sake of political correctness or at the insistence of sexual minorities, an aging gay man with the face of Richard Dreyfuss.

You won't get very far with a team like that. So the director decided to ignore the characters altogether and focus on the action. The killer wave will wipe out everyone fifteen minutes into the film. And then the people who came to see a Hollywood popcorn blockbuster and bought a large bucket of popcorn will have a really hard time: they won't have time to chew the white flakes because every minute something will be exploding on the screen, someone will drown again, someone will be rescued for the tenth time, and so on and so forth.

The main problem with the film is that by the time it reaches its halfway point, the non-stop action starts to wear you out. And the moments when the film tries to turn into some kind of drama seem completely far-fetched. Any character development was killed off at the conception stage: we are left with only very sketchy images of the heroes. Therefore, there is no desire to care about the characters. Who dies and who survives is completely irrelevant. What difference does it make? In the second half, you start to catch yourself thinking that you're watching a film from one action scene to the next. The main thing is that the director blows something up or destroys something on a grand scale, and doesn't forget to kill off one of the handful of people constantly flitting across the screen.