Via the cleverly cunning plan of suggesting it, I have finally managed to catch up on the last of my summer blockbuster list; well, I mean the ones that have been released yet. I’m still short one or two current films, mind you (*cough* See No Evil), but certainly no blockbusters. Heck, I’m not sure if there even are anymore until Superman. So, yay for that.

Also yay for Poseidon. Okay, sure, it’s a remake. But at least there was a book behind both films, so I can pretend like it’s not a remake, a little bit. On top of that, it really was quite a bit better than the original. Obviously, 30 plus years of special effects advances were put to good use. But also, lots more adrenaline-pumping action. Now, is that automatically a good thing, replacing a character study film set in a disaster with a disaster film? Normally not, but the character study portion of the original fell flat due to subpar acting. In this case, the substantially reduced character study portion worked, because of a more skilled cast. (Or maybe direction? How should I know?)

Plot: Boat flips over due to technobabble (really? A rogue wave? Even if those exist: really?), ten mostly random people band together to escape, come hell or high water. Lots of character translated across, and some didn’t. Any place that I could see a translated character, the new version did a better job (or at least as good), so that was a nice change of pace. Except for Ernest Borgnine, who was still great, but as there was no adversarial character to compare with his original in this new cast, I can just leave him being awesome in the original by himself. And except for the kid, because one child actor is pretty well interchangeable with another.

In fact, the only unfortunate part of the movie was the obligatory child in danger, and will he somehow be rescued in time? It served a purpose in the plot beyond the lameness of its existence, I acknowledge that. But it was lazy writing to serve said purpose with this tired old saw. Sure, right, an eight year old is going to wander away from his mother after about 53 minutes’ worth of terror-laden escapes from certain dooooom, and for no apparent reason whatsoever. Really, if the rest of the movie hadn’t been quite so good, this would not bother me nearly as much.