The secret to an ensemble disaster film is that the audience has to have a rooting interest in the characters. It's a given some people will perish during the course of the movie, and the fun is in guessing who dies and who makes it.
In this weak remake of the 1972 Irwin Allen classic, the characters are hopelessly dull and forgettable. I couldn't make an emotional attachment to a single person in the film, not like with Shelley Winters or Red Buttons in the original. What you have are faceless people coping with tremendous adversity, and what happens to them in the end is meaningless.
Normally, Wolfgang Peterson is a top-notch director of thrillers, but in this film the pacing is all wrong. Almost from the start, the action comes in frenetic clips that drown out any chance of character development. There is entirely too much reliance on computer graphics to generate excitement, and way too many explosions and fires that detract from the story line.
Speaking of which, the plot is flimsy at best. Like in the original, a wave overturns a massive cruise liner, and a small group of people struggle to climb upward towards the bottom of the ship in order to escape. If you completely suspend reality for a few hours and accept some of the crazy premises in the film, it's mildly entertaining, but considering the huge sum of money it took to make this film, that's not nearly enough.
No wonder Hollywood has begun to cut back on movie budgets.
In this weak remake of the 1972 Irwin Allen classic, the characters are hopelessly dull and forgettable. I couldn't make an emotional attachment to a single person in the film, not like with Shelley Winters or Red Buttons in the original. What you have are faceless people coping with tremendous adversity, and what happens to them in the end is meaningless.
Normally, Wolfgang Peterson is a top-notch director of thrillers, but in this film the pacing is all wrong. Almost from the start, the action comes in frenetic clips that drown out any chance of character development. There is entirely too much reliance on computer graphics to generate excitement, and way too many explosions and fires that detract from the story line.
Speaking of which, the plot is flimsy at best. Like in the original, a wave overturns a massive cruise liner, and a small group of people struggle to climb upward towards the bottom of the ship in order to escape. If you completely suspend reality for a few hours and accept some of the crazy premises in the film, it's mildly entertaining, but considering the huge sum of money it took to make this film, that's not nearly enough.
No wonder Hollywood has begun to cut back on movie budgets.