The plot change subbing terrorists for a tidal wave as the reason for the ship's fatal tipping point was something that got noted quite often in the reviews and blogs leading up to the November 20 airing of The Poseidon Adventure on NBC.
Although some of the reviews were quite positive, the rest were pretty dismissive -- not that I expected much when you're talking about a low-budget re-make of a fan classic. I'm not making excuses -- but the simple fact is that I didn't cast, produce, direct or edit and can't take responsibility for things I had zero responsibility for -- but I did write it, and the terrorists were my idea.
Poseidon purists (or critics looking for something to criticize) seemed to feel that, somehow, the freak tidal wave from the 1969 book or the 1972 film should have sufficed. They got their life jackets in a bunch over the NBC version where it's a terrorist attack in which only one of two explosive charges detonates and that causes an imbalance in the ship's metacentric height and capsizes it.
The reason for making the choice to add a terrorist sub-plot is really pretty simple. Understand that I was writing a four-hour mini-series version (which later was edited down to three hours for NBC), not a two-hour feature version. In a movie theater, the audience has already paid admission and, generally speaking, is going to stick through the entire film, especially a Poseidon, knowing the boat's going belly up eventually. Television is different. People have their hands on the remote practically all the time and if something isn't happening right now, they can, and will, change. This reality effectively means that simply waiting for an inevitable tidal wave isn't a sufficient stake in the TV version: the characters can't behave differently because, after all, they don't know it's coming.
That means something else has to be going on in that opening hour to create tension and it can't just be a series of disparate Love Boat stories that only mark time until the disaster. I chose terrorism for that reason and also because I think the cruise industry is as equally vulnerable as the airline industry here, but it hasn't really been explored in film.
Also, I wanted to explore the idea that one of the terrorists would survive among the passengers trying to make their way up top and out. He's kept alive by the Homeland Security "sea marshall" on board so that he can be questioned later about the plot to keep it from happening again and to find those responsible. There were many scenes where that dialogue never made it into the final cut. Had those words survived the editing process, I think viewers would also have seen some moments that voiced some of the fears and frustrations born of our 9/11 experience.
Moreover, I thought the passengers from the 1972 film were sometimes inappropriately hostile to each other in a tough situation and that 9/11, if it taught us anything, demonstrated that survivors actually worked together to help each other. While it's true that the editing process on the way to completed film made several of these characters a good deal less sympathetic than I imagined them in script by losing whole scenes and many personal lines, again, there wasn't much I could do about that.
Another key element was that I wanted there to be an honest-to-God hole blown in the side of the ship so that the passengers would have a good plan when they decided to climb upwards. The hole that started in the hull on the bottom was now up top and their way out.
And, finally, say I made no change whatsoever and kept the tidal wave: my experience with reviews and such is that I could just as easily have been slammed for not having any original ideas and re-making the same thing as before. So I went for a change because, as a writer, I'd prefer to try something new and go down with that ship if I had a choice.
Anyway, those are my reasons and I'm sticking with them...
