Heeeeeeelp!

Going down with the ship: Mike Vogel, Emmy Rossum and Richard Dreyfuss get into a panic in the film Poseidon. Photo Claudette Barius. Courtesy Warner Brothers Pictures.

Unhappy days are here again: the disaster film is back. Just like in the ’70s, when travel equalled terror (Airport) and the planet refused to behave (Earthquake), films in the new millennium are increasingly fraught with technological and environmental dangers. There are two travel warnings currently in effect in theatres: United 93 and a remake of The Poseidon Adventure (opening May 12).

An examination of the movies in question suggests that directors in each era have pursued contrasting agendas. Where the fright-meister of yore was typically a gaudy, B-movie showman who sought to provide escapist thrills, his modern-day counterpart displays the pained conscience of a soapbox pamphleteer. Here is a comparison of how two generations of filmmakers have cooked up very different recipes for disaster.

The not-so-sheltering sky

Airport (1970)

Scary premise: Take your pick. A drowning-in-sweat passenger (Van Heflin) with a tick-tick-ticking suitcase boards a crowded plane that he hopes to take to kingdom come. The pilot of the plane is Dean Martin.
No need to worry: The passengers include two cute nuns, a feisty priest and a grandma stowaway played by screen legend Helen Hayes. For upstaging a burning plane, Hayes won an Oscar.
Sublime B-movie moment: The feisty priest, pretending to cross himself, smacks a smart-alecky passenger in the snoot.

United 93 (2006)

Scary premise: 9/11, the Western World’s recurring nightmare, is portrayed for the first time on the big screen. The film dramatizes the hijacking of United Airlines Flight 93 on that fateful day in 2001.
Sign that we really are in trouble: Casting the film with recognizable actors would’ve made United 93 seem safer — more like a movie. By populating the film with unknowns, filmmaker Paul Greengrass surrounds the viewer with strangers, making us feel we’re part of the doomed crowd hurtling toward oblivion.
The big gulp: The film demonstrates how the bureaucratic and military response to the various hijackings that day was a case of panicked confusion: important security posts were left unmanned, some of the jetfighters mobilized by the military weren’t armed, others sped in the wrong direction over the Atlantic Ocean. Message: none of our safety belts work.

The cruel sea

The Poseidon Adventure (1972)

Scary premise: Take your pick. On New Year’s Eve, an ocean liner encounters a tidal wave; the ship turns turtle, trapping passengers inside a sinking coffin. The film features lots of underwater footage of Shelley Winters finning her way to freedom.
No need to worry: One of the passengers is Gene Hackman, a liberal priest who notices that the Christmas tree in the ship’s ballroom is made of aluminum. Now if everyone can just climb that tree to the next level….
Sublime B-movie moment: Sexy Stella Stevens, playing a reformed prostitute, takes off her blouse, offering it to a wounded passenger for use as a tourniquet.

Poseidon (2006)

Scary premise: Filmmaker Wolfgang Petersen (The Perfect Storm) pays homage to ’70s disaster movies by having a tidal wave hit when New Year’s Eve partiers are stayin’ alive in a cruise ship’s disco ballroom. The film sends up a lot of post-9/11 warning flares: our hero, Kurt Russell, is both an ex-firefighter and the heroic mayor of New York. Seems he once pulled people out of a burning building.
Sign that we really are in trouble: Kurt and fellow saviour Josh Lucas (Hulk) lead a frantic band of escapees (which includes Richard Dreyfuss as an architect) through floor after floor of charred dead bodies. It makes you wonder whether they’re fleeing the World Trade Center rather than the HMS Poseidon.
The big gulp: What if, after all their travails, the escapees make it up to the water’s surface, only to find that cranky great white shark from Jaws circling the lifeboats, hoping for another crack at Dreyfuss?

Whole lotta shakin’ goin’ on

Earthquake (1974)

Scary premise: Take your pick. An earthquake rips L.A. into concrete confetti; in an attempt to portray a marriage on the rocks, Charlton Heston and Ava Gardner shout at each other as if trying to talk over a roaring jet engine.
No need to worry: You had to figure Los Angeles was OK, no matter how bad the quake, with Charlton Heston playing the city’s structural engineer. Let’s not forget that as Moses in The Ten Commandments, he once parted the Red Sea.
Sublime B-movie moment: Earthquake came with Sensurround Sound: in select venues, speaker cabinets the size of freezers were positioned at the back of the theatre and behind the screen.

Worse traffic than usual: New Yorkers flee an onrushing tidal wave in The Day After Tomorrow. Courtesy 20th Century Fox.

The Day After Tomorrow (2004)

Scary premise: Meteorologists’ worst predictions come true, as the Gulf Stream faucet shuts off, exciting a variety of global catastrophes. Bowling ball-sized hailstones pulverize Tokyo, a tornado peels Los Angeles off the map and a tidal wave — followed by plummeting temperatures — turns New York into a frozen Atlantis.
Sign that we really are in trouble: Blockbuster filmmaker Roland Emmerich (Independence Day) makes sure his audience understands the implication of the film’s title by casting Perry Long and Kenneth Welsh as dead ringers for U.S. President George W. Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney. At one point, Welsh’s character brushes aside a dire prediction of collapsing ecosystems by muttering, “Our economy is every bit as fragile as the environment.”
The big gulp: At one point, the Cheney clone appears to take over the government, speaking to America via the Weather Network.

Takeover bids

The Swarm (1978)

Scary premise: Take your pick. Killer bees from Africa take over the southwestern United States; Michael Caine plays a dashing entomologist in a safari jacket.
No need to worry: The film announces its larky intentions when the buzzing troublemakers take out an air force base. Sample dialogue: “Will history blame me, or the bees?” “They’re brighter than we thought. They always are.” “They’re more virulent than the Australian brown-box jellyfish.”
Sublime B-movie moment: To avoid dipping into the film’s $70-million bee-sting insurance policy, producer Irwin Allen (The Poseidon Adventure, Earthquake) hired desperate showbiz wannabes to sit in refrigerated units in order to clip the stingers off thousands of groggy bees.

28 Days Later (2002)

Scary premise: Well-intentioned animal-rights activists liberate lab monkeys infected with a “rage” virus, unleashing the furious beasts on modern London. The disease gains intensity in human hosts; once bitten, people become frothing zombies in precisely 20 seconds.
Sign that we really are in trouble: Shot fast and dirty on digital video and featuring many unknown actors, director Danny Boyle’s (Trainspotting) take on viral contamination and creeping social alienation has the look and feel of a documentary. This most distressing of modern disaster movies feeds on our fear of coming plagues.
The big gulp: In recounting how the Rage came upon the world, one survivor tells another that before the first London TV news broadcasts of the epidemic were over, the deadly virus had already spread throughout Europe and North America.

Poseidon opens May 12 across Canada.

Stephen Cole writes about the arts for CBC.ca.

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