Ghost Ship 2002 Review
Tisham Candella
To begin our journey we were blindfolded, led into a darkened room, and shackled to the floor. A brief audio cue tipped us off to the story, then it was time to remove our blindfolds and begin our escape. This is the best opening to an escape room I have ever experienced as it started things off with a bang. The gimmick was also well utilized in the sense that the keys were just out of our reach, so we had to reason our way through to achieve our freedom.
Of course, to reverse the curse and get out, we had to solve a few headscratchers along the way. For the most part the puzzles were fairly basic straightforward, though my group ran into a few snags due to missing some vital information. If I had to make one comment upon the riddles themselves it would be that there could easily have been more puzzles for the amount of space in the rooms.
Now the sets themselves were absolutely bang up from the first holding room to the final altar chamber. There was a good integration of the pirate theme that never once skimped on the darkness inherent in a ghost ship voyage. In fact, the altar room had a good deal of blood, gore, and bodies on hand which ensured a memorable conclusion to our journey.
There were a few technical difficulties in our game that brought us out of the moment and hindered our progress. The first speed bump was that the leg shackles did not fit on everyone in our group which sort of negated some of the experience for my fellow team members. The bigger problem we ran into was that one of the rooms was unlighted when we entered and we had assumed that was purposeful. We fumbled around for quite a while and even pulled out our cellphone flashlights before it became clear that the issues was not puzzle based. Obviously this sort of thing is an easy enough fix, but if we had not been able to complete the room due to fumbling in the dark for son long, I would have been very disappointed.
All in all, this was a nice introductory room to what 60Out Escape Rooms have to offer that got me excited to see some of their other challenges. This is one of their older rooms so I cannot wait to see how they have grown and advanced since this offering. Fans of movies like Pirates of the Caribbean (2003) are sure to find this of a similar ilk.
This post may contain affiliate links. If you use these links to buy something, CGMagazine may earn a commission. However, please know this does not impact our reviews or opinions in any way. See our ethics statement.
CGMagazine may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our affiliate partnerships with retailers. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of CGMagazine. By using this website, you signify your acceptance of these Terms of Use.
One of the many things that initially drew me into the poem, and one of the things that I love about it is the paradox of movement and stasis that is enacted throughout. Much of this movement and paradox is brought about by the supreme musicality and structure of the poem. Can you talk about this movement, in both content and form, the stopping and starting throughout?
Derek Mong is a poet, essayist, and translator whose books include Other Romes (2011), The Identity Thief (2018), The Ego and the Empiricist (2017), and The Joyous Science: Selected Poems of Maxim Amelin (with his wife, Anne O. Fisher, 2018). The Byron K. Trippet Assistant Professor of English at Wabash College, he holds degrees from Denison University, the University of Michigan, and Stanford, and has held poetry fellowships at the University of Wisconsin and the University of Louisville. His work appears widely: the Kenyon Review, Blackbird, Pleiades, Two Lines, Poetry Northwest, and in the recent anthology, Writers Resist: Hoosier Writers Unite. A new long poem can be found online in At Length.
Derek is currently the Byron K. Trippet Assistant Professor of English at Wabash College where he teaches American literature, poetry, and creative writing. He blogs at the Kenyon Review Online and reviews new poetry. Born in Portland, Oregon and raised outside of Cleveland, Ohio, he now makes his home in Crawfordsville, Indiana with his wife and son. www.derekmong.com
I feel I should start this review with something profound, something revelatory, something that simply blows the reader away with its originality. That way, this review would perfectly mirror the start of Ghost Ship.
I am not going to spoil the beginning of the film, suffice to say that it is one of the best opening sequences ever committed to celluloid. Yes, it is THAT good. It opens in a rather strange way, making me wonder if I was watching the right film. An old fashioned Warner Brothers logo appears, followed by a beautifully shot, romantic scene of people dancing to a live band on the deck of a ship on a moonlit night. The whole ambience is like an episode of Love Boat but with a budget and some class. Things are not as they seem, though, and anyone watching is likely to get rather a shock with the brutal and disturbing change of pace.
The trouble is that the opening is SO brilliant, so well conceived, and so well implemented that the rest of the film quite simply cannot live up to it. No, perhaps I should rephrase that. The problem is that the opening is so brilliant, the rest of the film realises that it cannot live up to it, and therefore doesn't even try. This is a shame as with the cast that is present here, the film could have been so much more.
The ship, as mentioned in the second paragraph, is now a rotting hulk and floating in the Bering Strait. The Arctic Warrior, a salvage ship captained by Sean Murphy (Gabriel Byrne) and the 'daughter he never had', first mate Maureen Epps (Julianne Margulies), recruit an additional four members of thier crew and set out to plunder her. Once found and boarded they unfortunately find that all is not as it seems. The boat is haunted by ghosts that are not satisfied with just scaring the salvagers but want to kill them as well. Thus one by one our friends meet their ends, until, inevitably, only one is left to deal with the force behind the mysterious events.
With a promising plot, a decent cast, and the vision to mount such a tremendous opening, this really should have been a modern classic. Sadly, though, the appalling script means that it quickly dissolves into a confused mess which makes the cardinal mistake of never actually being half as clever as it thinks it is. This means that as it piles on ever stranger and more convoluted motives behind events (I am trying not to spoiler things here), the more confusing the whole movie becomes.
There is also, after that spectacular beginning, very little in the way of action and gore until the latter part of the movie. There is a lot of exposition and build up, which means that the film becomes rather unbalanced. Also, the filling of the first half with so many back stories, in an attempt to create empathy for the characters, fails due to the rather weak scripting and hackneyed dialogue, thus we are never fully invested the way the director intended.
The actors, apparently, signed up to the film based on a script that changed massively between them seeing it and the time they arrived on set. By then it was too late. This would certainly explain why the respected talent seem to have phoned in their performances. Byrne and Margulies in particular are talented actors who have a range about their work, and are capable of bringing nuance to their performances. However, neither of them manages that here. Instead, they seem to be sleep walking through their performances, never truly selling their characters as real creations. The supporting cast are your usual clichd mix of cannon fodder, clearly destined to die from the moment they are recruited. They are like Starfleet redshirts - merely expendable ciphers. One of these actors, Karl Urban, was to go on and prove his worth in major films like Star Trek and Lord of The Rings but his promotion could certainly not have been based on his performance here which is as wooden as performances can be.
The frustrating thing about this is just how many good things that exist in this film. I cannot overstate how good the opening is, and the production design is also fantastic. They use models rather than CGI, and the effect is always entirely believable. One scene, which takes place in the water right against the hull of the ship, is extremely impressive and very believable. The interiors are also impeccable, always selling the story in a far better way than any of the actors ever manage. They are also lit superbly, as is the whole film, and this does a lot to help sell the creepy ambience that the director is striving for. The special effects are also extremely impressive, and when gore does appear it is always realistic and horrifying.
Ghost Ship is not a film that should be discounted out of hand. But the problem is that the bad stuff (acting, performances, script, plot) far outweigh the good stuff (beginning, set design, effects). The overall result is a cliched film that simply retreads areas where other films have been before, and not as successfully as them. In other words, this is probably the definitive rental disc. This is a film that will certainly go down well for one viewing on a Saturday night with your brain in neutral, and your stomach full of a beverage of your choice. The rewatchability level of the disc is quite low however, and it is not one that really deserves a permanent place in a film fan's collection.
In this most recent series, Songs from the Ghost Ship, semi-fictional characters are set against the dark starry night sky. The exhibition includes nine oil paintings in addition to four works on paper. One of the works on paper shares its name with the exhibition, depicting a jumpered man with a white ghost looking over his shoulder.
c80f0f1006