‘Poseidon’ steers into waters of disaster genre

updated 3:48 p.m. ET May 15, 2006

LOS ANGELES - How movie-goers love to go down with the ship. Or be toasted in a skyscraper fire. Buried by an earthquake. Squashed by an asteroid. Ravaged by global warming.

Hollywood serves up the latest in a venerable line of disaster films with “Poseidon,” a remake of “The Poseidon Adventure,” about a luxury liner overturned by a rogue wave.

“The Poseidon Adventure” launched a 1970s mini-craze for worst-case-scenario movies with star-studded casts such as “The Towering Inferno” and “Earthquake.”

Since then we’ve had dueling volcano movies in “Dante’s Peak” and “Volcano.” Battling asteroid flicks with “Armageddon” and “Deep Impact.” Monster tornadoes tearing up the heartland in “Twister.” Scientists tunneling to the center of the Earth to fix an electromagnetic breakdown causing global chaos in “The Core.” Global warming wreaking catastrophic climate shifts in “The Day After Tomorrow.”

The things we most fear in reality, it seems, are among the things we love to watch while munching popcorn with strangers in the dark.

“To witness a group of people in extreme situations is a human phenomenon,” said Kurt Russell, starring in “Poseidon” as a former firefighter and New York City mayor who’s among a band of survivors struggling their way upward deck by deck after the ship is capsized.

“It gives you kind of a simple, primal sense of, ‘Who’s going to make it? Who’s not going to make it?’ And you sort of begin to associate with certain characters. You say, ‘I’m like that person. I hope I would behave like that person in that situation.’ Then when something horrible or deathly happens to that person, you switch your allegiance. The audience goes, whoops, maybe I don’t want to be that person. You pick a survivor. You want to survive.”

There's no ‘Morning After’
The cast of “Poseidon,” opening Friday, includes Richard Dreyfuss as a suicidal architect, Josh Lucas as a gambler with a maritime background that comes in handy after the ship flips, Andre Braugher as the vessel’s captain, Emmy Rossum as Russell’s daughter and Mike Vogel as her fiance.

Stacy “Fergie” Ferguson of the Black Eyed Peas plays the singer in the ship’s ballroom band, though the remake does avert one disaster from the original: She doesn’t sing “The Morning After.”

Disaster flicks allow audiences to do something they can’t in real life, experience the worst calamities imaginable in safety and comfort.

“We’ve been watching fictional catastrophes since the Bible was written,” Dreyfuss said. “That’s why they’re there. That’s what art is all about. We get to drive slowly by the traffic accident hoping to see something horrible, knowing it’s not you.”

Fictional disaster is an easier sell than stories based on real tragedy. “United 93” could be characterized as a disaster film, a painfully authentic docudrama about passengers who fought back and died in the crash of one of the planes hijacked by terrorists on Sept. 11, 2001.

Yet the pain of those events is too deep and recent for many movie-goers, and the film’s realistic approach leaves viewers feeling as though they are reliving that terrible day.

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