Breaking Films Up For Scrap

I watched the 2006 film Poseidon the other night on the television. I shouldn't have done this : not because I spend a good deal of my spare time on cruise ships and it might prove upsetting, but because it was a lousy film. It is a long time since I last saw the original 1972 Poseidon Adventure film but my memory is that it was far superior to this cardboard-scripted remake.

I was sent upstairs to watch the film alone in my room : Isobel was at a loss to know how I could watch such things given that I will be back on a cruise ship in a few months time. The possible confluence of fictional interpretation and real fear has never been a particular problem for me. I remember the first time I ever went on a cruise I took along Walter Lord's splendid book "A Night To Remember" to read and I didn't spend all the holiday fearfully searching for icebergs.

By some strange coincidence the morning after my disappointing adventure with Poseidon I was flicking through a collection of photographs from the 1930s and came across this picture of the German battleship Prinz-Regent Luitpold which was taken in 1933. The ship saw action in the Battle of Jutland in World War I and in 1919 was scuttled with the rest of the German fleet in Scapa Flow. However she suffered a greater indignity fourteen years later when she was raised from the seabed and towed in this very unladylike fashion to Rosyth dockyard where she was broken up for scrap. Perhaps the re-made Poseidon should suffer the same fate.