Ghost Ship is one of those movies you’d find yourself staying up late to watch in the early 2000s because you had some bad indigestion from supper or you slept too late on a weekend morning and worried about the week ahead at work. It’s starts off wonderful with a B-movie horror style and then you find yourself wondering why the middle lags so much like lack of win on a sail that you just drift toward the conclusion that never does earn its twist.
Despite what people think, it wasn’t just the success of Titanic that ignited any interest in movies set at sea around the turn of the millenium. Most were probably greenlit and set to film when everyone thought Titanic was going to flop. Movies like Cutthroat Island and White Squall had preceded Titanic and were major disasters which led people to think that Oscar-winning epic (which had many huge problems and a theatrical release changed from summer to Christmas season) would sink faster than the real ship. Deep Rising was already to go before the first ticket Titanic was sold as was Sphere but was delayed reportedly due to special effects.
Then, you had Virus, Deep Blue Sea and Cast Away. So, it was just depended on what the premise was about and how the production handled it. A movie like Cast Away could’ve bombed if filmed poorly. So, when Ghost Ship premiered in the Fall of 2002, it had an impressive cast including Julianna Margulies, Gabriel Byrnes, Ron Eldard, Karl Urban, Isiah Washington, Desmond Harrington and a young Emily Browning. They’re not exactly A-listers but they’re usually the actors who you see in other movies where they’re good. It also had the production team of Joel Silver, Robert Zemeckis and Gilbert Adler, who had brought Tales from the Crypt to HBO in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Zemeckis was also riding high from Cast Away and What Lies Beneath.
The movie begins with a wonderful but now proven improbable opening in which the passengers of the MS Antonia Graza are enjoying a nice evening celebration dancing and a young Katie Harwood (Browning) dances with the ship’s captain. But someone pulls a lever and the next thing we or anyone else knows, a wire cord rips through the entire people on the dance floor killing them, with the exception of Katie because she’s too short. This is the type of opening that really gets you hooked or as legendary filmmaker Samuel Fuller once said, “If a story doesn’t give you a hard-on in the first couple of scenes, throw it in the goddamned garbage.”
It’s just a shame the rest of the movie up until the ending doesn’t feel the same. Margulies later said the story was supposed to be more psychological than supernatural. But when everyone arrived in Queensland, Australia to film it, they discovered the script had been heavily re-written to add more supernatural elements and violence/gore. The focus was on a salvage ship crew getting stranded and slowly turning on each other. Mark Hanlon who had made the independent Buddy Boy wrote the first draft of the script this way but it was rewritten with John Pogue at the behest of Silver who was well known in the industry for making changes. And since he had produced the megahit movie The Matrix, he could do whatever he damn well pleased.
While the Sept. 11 terrorism attacks were still fresh on everyone’s mind, director Steve Beck said the idea was to make it more of a clear good fight between good and evil than about the corruption of man. This is only Beck’s second movie and as of this posting, his last directing credit. He has worked in film for years doing visual effects for Industrial Light and Magic. But I can understand, despite the movie’s modest success, why he decided to walk way from the director’s chair.
The premise focuses on a salvage team lead by Captain Sean Murphy (Byrne) set 40 years after the Antonio Graza was lost at sea. They are approached by Jack Ferriman (Harrington) who says he is a weather service pilot and noticed a vessel adrift near the Berring Straight. He works out a deal with the crew and they set sail. The crew consists of Maureen Epps (Margulies), Dodge (Eldard), Greer (Washington) and Munder (Urban) as well as Santos (Alex Dimitirades) who come upon the Antonio Graza in the middle of a storm.
They board the ship discovering what it is as well as that it’s the lost ship of legend. The ship is abandoned and seems eerie but they discover nine boxes contained 28 gold bars each. Realizing they’re in international waters, they can take the gold and go home rich as well as taking the salvage with them. But an unseen force sabotages their boat, the Arctic Warrior, causing it to explode killing Santos. Now, they have to see if they can repair the Antonio Graza.
But strange occurrences start happening. Like Event Horizon and other horror movies, people see things that aren’t there. One of the best scenes is when Dodge and Munder dare themselves over opening 40-year-old cans of food to eat but discover it’s not what they seem. And there’s remnants of Hanlon’s original script with the crew members turning on each other as the greed over the gold causes tension. Add to that hallucinations of seeing people that may not exist and no one knows who to believe.
Unfortunately, this all results into a violent bloody finale in which we see what really happened back in 1962. And despite what many movies have shown about wire cable, they really can’t cut people in half especially dozens of people spread out on a dance floor. An episode of Mythbusters proved this was incorrect. Even though the force of a wire cable hitting someone hard and fast might do damage, I don’t it would be as sharp to dissect people. Even a bullet shot from a gun can shatter going through one person before striking another.
Not to say there isn’t some good scenes. I really like Browning’s role as we don’t know if she’s supposed to be innocent or sinister. And Harrington, who was great on the TV show Dexter, does a good job at making us believe he’s someone he’s not. But you ought to know by now seeing a movie like this, anytime someone tries to get people to go somewhere they shouldn’t in a horror movie, they’re usually up to no good. Sadly, Byrne and Margulies are underused. Margulies has also shined more as a TV actress. And Eldard and Urban seem to be the type of actors who can play both good and bad and in between if the story requires it.
In some ways, movies like Ghost Ship that came out in the latter 1990s and early 2000s were precursors to the “gorno” craze of the latter decade with the Saw and Hostel movies. I feel that if Hanlon’s original script idea had been filmed in the 1990s or in the 2010s of 2020s it might have been more successful. But the 2000s were an odd time for moviemaking. Everything about this movie looks like there was a better movie that wasn’t allowed to emerge. Francesca Rettondini gives off both a sultry and mysterious vibe in her scenes as a singer, Francesca, who seduces Greer.
I feel late comic Roger Ebert said it best in his review: “It’s better than you expect but not as good as you hope.”
What do you think? Please comment.
Zane Says 