This 1hr 55minute implausible sort-of action adventure will put me right to sleep

Originally published at: http://boingboing.net/2017/03/08/this-1hr-55minute-implausible.html

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I loved that movie as a kid and the ending where the hero decides the US and USSR need to settle their problems like adults, was like John the Baptist to Snake Plissken doing the same thing in Escape from New York

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Most memorable thing about it (as someone who’s seen it) was from one of it’s producers, Lew Grade’s comment about it: ‘It would have been cheaper to lower the Atlantic’

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there’s an alternate universe where Cussler’s Dirk Pitt is as successful and has as many movie adapations as Clancy’s Jack Ryan

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Right? How hard is it to successfully make a film where you have “if Indiana Jones and James Bond had a love child” adapted from books that just scream “look how easy I would be to make a screenplay out of”?

Apparently really hard since both times have failed so miserably.

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This was my favorite movie when I was eight! It was right up there with The Final Countdown.

And in recent years I discovered the plot was possibly not so far-fetched:

I was on a weird time travel kick a few years ago and added this one to the queue (after not having seen it since I was a wee lad.) I was amazed that it was actually about 15 minutes of an actual movie and the rest a commercial for the Navy. Come for the little bit of story, stay for the monotonous footage of daily life on board a US aircraft carrier!

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Ah. So kind of like The Starfighters!

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Good companion for The Philadelphia Experiment.

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I love the adorable conceit that the wreck of the Titanic would be in one, sturdy, totally intact piece. A bit of hubris utterly shattered a mere five years later when Dr. Ballard and his team discovered the two equally shattered pieces of the wreck.

Go ahead kids, you raise that wreck.

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This one’s a floater, alright.

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I remember reading an article before the wreck was located (might have been the World Book Encyclopedia entry on the Titanic for all I can remember) wherein they included a series of sketches by one of the survivors that showed the ship breaking in half very much like it was shown in Cameron’s movie, but the caption mentioned that this might not be likely since the artist was apparently the only survivor to mention the ship breaking in half.

As for Raise the Titanic, I never saw the movie, but I did read the paperback when I was 11 or so. I thought it was a thrilling concept, but the book seemed to take its time getting to “the good part,” so it’s just about the only novel I ever skipped pages while reading to get to the action.

As a result, I never read another Dirk Pitt novel.

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If memory serves, at least part of John Barry’s OST was fantastic

I remember seeing the actual raising bit when I was a kid with the CG vector line-art of the boat slowly moving up the screen… my father even commented at the time that they’d glossed over the bit where the Titanic tore in half on it’s way down…

As someone who read a lot of Dirk Pitt novels, you saved yourself a pile of wasted time on awful fiction.

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I saw this as a double feature with Sean Connery’s METEOR. Loved both of them! I was also eight.

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