Ghost Ship (2002)

I have vague memories of watching this film years ago.  I remember not liking it very much.  Seeing it appear on Shudder, I thought I would revisit it, in case I had judged it unfairly.

Perhaps.  It's an okay film, blessed with a good cast and budget 'all on screen' as they say; but it struggles to put its story across convincingly.

Torches.  There are a lot of torches in this film.  at least these guys came prepared.

The producers include Robert Zemeckis and Joel Silver.  Big name producers guarantees a decent budget and access to resources but it also puts some limitations in terms of tone and story.  It can't be too dark, it's a Robert Zemeckis film.  It has to be brash and loud and in-your-face, it's a Joel Silver film.

So, to the story.  A crew of rugged, tough-as-nails salvagers are commissioned by a completely unsinister stranger called Ferriman (geddit?) to locate and salvage a liner that has been drifting in the Bering Sea for 40 years.  They locate it, board it and start to discover Things Are Not What They Seem.  The ship holds Dark Secrets and a Terrible Fate awaits our luckless crew of scurvy seadogs.

The production didn't have enough torches for everyone, which is why they had to Split The Party

Positives - the cast, led by Gabriel Byrne and Julianna Margulies,  is gold.  Margulies had just left ER and Gabriel Byrne was ... well, Gabriel Byrne.  While paying the bills with this confection, he was also making Spider with David Cronenburg.  Quite a year!

The minor roles are also well cast, everyone inhabiting their roles with the aplomb of competent actors playing stock characters.  Sometimes, you feel you could be watching the the 'Marines dicking about' scenes in Aliens.  At no point in the film do we sense the script writers were searching long and hard for an original idea anywhere in the film; but as far as characterisations went they only journeyed a very short way indeed.  It works, and it gets us into the story with alacrity.  Still, it is hard to shake the feeling we are hit with too many faces in too short a time; but you need a decent complement of bodies if they are going to be picked off, one by one ...

They should have known they had too many characters when they found they could barely get them all in shot ...

The setting is magnificent.  There is something fascinating about the idea of  ghost ships.  The bleak, rusted hulk of the Antonia Graza does not disappoint.  It is a film maker's dream - every step is a visual treat and a potential trap, every scene illuminated by stabs of torches or eerie flicking light through portholes.

They spend most of the budget on torch batteries

Though it is mostly made of smoke and mirrors, the vessel is absolutely convincing.  The film is at its strongest here, as the salvage crew nervously pick their way through the decayed remains, before the plot gets in the way of our enjoyment of their exploration of a strange, threatening landscape.  Again, it is reminiscent of the scenes in Aliens where the stalwart marines investigate the deserted colony, a place both banally familiar and redolent with threat.

The plot - when it does rear its head - is interesting enough, and director Steve Beck keeps things moving and stages it effectively.  There's gold on board.  But how did it get there, and why?  And how does the presence of the gold relate to the opening scene, where passengers and crew are bloodily sliced in half by in a fiendish trap.  Theft?  But why, then, is the gold still there?

Anything that isn't a torch in this film is rust

The story that unspools is pretty cool.  If anything, it is perhaps too ambitious for a 90 minute film with big money demanding set piece thrills and big explosions.  Nowadays, it would be a Netflix mini-series.  Or it could have been an 80s John Carpenter project.  The one time it couldn't have been made successfully, perhaps, is 2002.  Which is unfortunately when it was made.  Post-Titanic, if you were dumb enough to make a big-boat movie, it had to be made right.  It needed spectacle.  The ships had to look the part, and you needed to sink them spectacularly, or blow them to smithereens.

Sometimes the weight of studio expectations seems particularly heavy, bearing down on what could have been an effective little nautical chiller. Everything is a bit too big - the cast is too big, the Antonia Graza is too big, the revelations about what happened too big to be crammed into a focus grouped, audience friendly 90 minute run time.

Did I mention there is a Weird Little Girl on board?

And these expectations corrode the story.  After the firey death of the Antonia Graza, Julianna Margulies's Epps drifts off like Rose, clinging onto a crate, happily bobbing about the Bering Sea until she is picked up by a cruise ship that just happens to sail past.  The unlikeliness of any of these events - Epps surviving a massive underwater explosion, enduring the chilly waters of the Bering Sea or a cruise ship finding her - are happily ignored in favour of a pat resolution.

Or the pointless scene where the two comedy crew members scoff 40 year old tinned food ... which turns into maggots in their mouths.  Yeah, we've seen The Lost Boys, too. Or the bullet holes that leak blood (why?), or the swimming pool that fills up with blood.  Or the seduction scene, allowing a brief flash of nipples to keep the boys happy (hey, it worked in Titanic.) 

"Free the fucking nipple!" - Florence Pugh, 2022

Predictable moments like that do not frighten or amuse - they simply annoy all but the most easily entertained.  Sometimes the film seems to be a studio induced series of references to other films - The Shining, The Thing, Terminator 2,  Angel Heart ... nods to horror classics that don't satisfy.

There was so much potential in the tale.  My favourite novel is Joseph Conrad's Nostromo, a dark, complex tail of how greed and obsession can corrupt any soul.  You can see shades of it in Ghost Ship, with the allure of the gold tainting everyone.  Nostromo also introduces the idea this obsession can endure ebyond death, with ghosts tied to treasure, unable to abandon their hoard and rest in peace.  Ghost Ship sails close to this idea, but then rejects it in favour of something more traditionally supernatural and less morally satisfying.

Interestingly, the earlier drafts of the script worked along similar lines - a smaller cast and a more psychological focus, rather than the visually arresting but unsatisfying fun-house-with-portholes and explosions we are given.  Original writer, Mark Hanlon, described his original script (initially titled Chimera) to Bloody Disgusting: "It was more of a psychological thriller and a little bit internalized in its horror, rather than being more obvious and slasheresque ...  I think it’s the kind of movie that Joel Silver wanted to make, but it sure wasn’t what I’d wanted to make."

OUCH!  Feel the burn, Joel?

I enjoyed Ghost Ship the second time around.  Perhaps I have mellowed over the years and become less pretentious.  It's a good, straight forward, action themed horror film with a terrific cast in a great setting.  But I would love, love to see what Hanlon's original Chimera would have been like.

Star Rating: **