Village Voice: Poseidon Smells of Death

The best and most provocative critical quote yet about Poseidon arrives courtesy of Michael Atkinson's piece in the Village Voice.

"Poseidon may, like Spielberg's War of the Worlds, go down better outside of the metro area than within. A supposedly fun thing I may never want to do again after 9-11, disaster films are simple death porn, and the easy wow factor of fireballs, massive explosions, flying bodies, and architectural obliteration on a large scale is, or should be, no longer a gimme. Petersen's film doesn't avert its gaze from the corpses and mayhem like the original, relatively speaking, did—as if to, what, chasten us for ever enjoying the genre? Or has 9-11, in Hollywood's eyes, been converted to a kind of combat seasoning, after which we should not only tolerate experiences of bloody catastrophe but thrill to them?"

Lisa Schwarzbaum unconvincingly offers qualified kudos for the movie, giving it a B+ in her review for Entertainment Weekly:

"Wolfgang Petersen's Poseidon delivers all of this — it's a buoyant, old-wave disaster pic for a generation of well-conditioned thrill seekers charmed by the revelation that Richard Dreyfuss really is the Red Buttons of our day."

No accounting for (bad) taste, I guess.

For links to more Poseidon reviews (generally nasty), check out the Metacritic site.