Titanic on a boat!

Terrific combination:

1. Read the title essay in David Foster Wallace's anthology "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again". (Settle in -- it's at least 60 dense, footnoted pages, if I recall correctly.)


2. Watch "Poseidon".

At the risk of spoiling it for Grumpy, I'm going to have to disclose that Fun Thing details Wallace's experiences as 'your correspondent' for Harper's on a subsidized 7 Night Luxury Cruise. Poseidon details the experiences of a group of off-the-shelf characters trying to escape the same, except in their case the boat's been capsized by a rogue wave and lies belly up on the ocean taking on water from what was its top.

One of the things I've been enjoying about Wallace's correspondent pieces is how they mix vivid description, insightful observation, and multi-layered analysis in such a way that I almost feel like I don't actually have to experience the subject event myself anymore -- it really feels like I've been there.

So when Poseidon cuts to shots of the service staff working in the galley after the terrific long, sweeping shot of Josh Lucas jogging around on the decks of an entirely CG cruise ship, I remained fully engaged. For one, I wondered if they toiled under the same service-industry oppression that turned Wallace's insistence on carrying his own duffel bag to his cabin into something of a federal case, prompting a personal visit and apology for the deck's baggage handler's incompetency from the manager. I pondered the feasibility of sneaking one's girlfriend onto a cruise like one of the galley staff's characters had done when, as Wallace found, every nook of one's cabin is mysteriously cleaned to perfection anytime one leaves it for longer than 30 minutes. When the curtain went up on the saucy Latin songstress during the ship's formal New Year's party, I wondered if her act was preceded by a passenger talent show and hypnotist/comedian much like the main act at the final night's formal on Wallace's cruise.

Taking stock...

As we meet the characters, I wonder about the statistical aberration of having an ex-NYC mayor, an ex-Navy professional gambler, and so many young, attractive, pre-retirement people on the same cruise boat. I wonder how many of the bridge officers are Greek, which would have been consistent with Wallace's findings that most cruise lines were operated out of Greece, tending to skew the composition of the officers towards the same.

Basically, whenever large volumes of rushing, flooding, pouring, bubbling, drowning water weren't on screen, I had plenty of things to keep me occupied. So that I found the 'character-driven' moments not entirely unbearable will have to be taken with a huge grain of salt. Accomplishing that, the story was able to maintain at least some minimal alignment between what it wanted me to care about and what I actually did care about as I watched the passengers get abused by those spectacular torrents of water.

It's coming!

And they truly are spectacular, orgasmic in much the way Wallace describes in another piece of his, "F/X porn". I had wondered what else was to be done for CG water after Perfect Storm besides maybe tweaking a few things on the simulators and maybe doing a better job on the color. I saw that there were indeed many more interesting things to be done, particularly the colors we see as the ship's festive lighting gets smothered by cascades of whitewater and various systems short and blow out during the impact sequence. Also worth mentioning are the rather graphic scenes of humans getting incinerated in flash fires, dropping onto ballroom ceilings, or getting themselves crushed or impaled on various shipboard implements made hazardous simply by being flipped upside down.

You'll endure this all together with the characters, and by extension, Wallace. And as the characters finally poke their heads out above water in the end, you'll find an amazing synergy between them, your proverbial correspondent, and yourself as together you sigh and are just happy to have survived the experience.