So I watched USA Indianapolis: Men of Courage last night, hoping to see some of the atmosphere, tension, bravery and determination shown in 'In Harms Way' which is a fabulous book by Douglas Stanton told from interviews with survivors of the disaster.
What I was 'treated' to was one of the worst films I've seen in ages. An alarmingly low quality, hammed up mess of a film with zero plot and acting so wooden it wouldn't have surprised me if they all survived by floating.
How the hell can you fuck up such a fascinating story? Why add a convoluted plot at the start, based around 2 dimensional characters whose names you'll forget after half an hour? Seriously, no one will give a fuck about the love triangle back home or that such bollocks - especially when the acting is so bad and the 'story' heading into B Movie territory.
Then we've got Tom Sizemore playing a character so unbelievably odd it's like he was doing an impression of a Pixar character with dialogue ripped from an 80's turd movie. Someone wrote that character. And probably got paid for it.
The action scenes? I don't know why I thought this was a film with an actual budget but the special effect were dreadful. The CGI sharks as believable as a Nigel Farage promise, it looked like the ship was sunk in a bath.
The camera work is all over the place. The juxtaposition of scenes doesn't make any sense. The sense of isolation and despair when they're stranded in the water never came across because either the acting was so bad, they were being menaced by creepy SNES graphics with fins or the director decided to make certain scenes light hearted!!
I think that when you're making a film about a historical event that saw hundreds of people die in appalling conditions that you have a duty to show some respect. This was such a mess of a film that it doesn't get close to doing this, though not intentionally so.
The book I've read has so many fascinating individual accounts of the sinking and subsequent ordeal in the sea but the only real story is Nicholas Cage's Captain McVay. There were so many more they could have focused on as well rather than the fictitious, shallow nonsense they ended up with.
It's bad enough when you see a shit film but had low expectations of it. But this was a perfect opportunity to tell the story of the Indianapolis in a proper way. But instead it was utter shit. I was pleading with it to finish and put me out of my misery.
Can't say I recommend it. Apparently it went straight to DVD. That doesn't surprise me in the slightest. It was like Titanic (without the production values) mixed with Sharknado mixed with the most basic B movie you can imagine.
