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It is May the 21st, 1962. On board the luxury Italian ocean liner Antonia Graza, a little girl looks on, bored, as adult passengers dance together. On the bridge, after a switch is furtively pushed to 'massimo', a cable grows visibly more and more taut. The little girl joins the captain in a dance, when suddenly the cable jerks across the ballroom floor, slicing all the dancers neatly in half. It is the present day. Captain Sean Murphy (Gabriel Byrne) and his crew are hired by pilot Jack Ferriman (Desmond Harrington) to salvage an ocean liner which he has spotted adrift in the Bering Sea. Despite their strong sense that something is not quite right about the unmanned Antonia Graza, the crew is only too willing to profit from the ship, especially when they discover the crates of gold bullion on board - until, that is, they all start dying, one by one, under mysterious circumstances... Despite its promising prologue, once 'Ghost Ship' reaches cruising speed it sets a direct course for predictability. If I tell you that only two of the crew are not white, can you guess which two die first? If I say that only one of the crew is female, can you guess who gets to survive? The cast is adequate, but all the characters are merely stock cliches, each of whose grisly demises becomes ever more welcome, if only because it indicates that the film is so much closer to being over. Believe me, if you haven't worked out the film's 'shock' conclusion within the first twenty minutes, this is only because the film has failed to grab even a quarter of your attention. As the salvagers move through the ship's dark corridors, periodically losing radio contact with one another, and discovering ever more evidence of some terrible past event, one can't help thinking of the beginning of 'Alien'. And as Epps (Juliana Margulies) keeps seeing the ghost of a little girl, and the abandoned ballroom miraculously comes to life, one can't help thinking of 'The Shining'. But, unlike either 'Alien' or 'The Shining', 'Ghost ship' has committed the cardinal sin of all horror films: it has forgotten to be scary. Anton Bitel, 27.01.03 |
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