I've always thought that the progenitor of this Poseidon-adventure genre was Arthur C. Clarke's `A Fall of Moondust', published in 1961. It's a pity that book was never filmed. It could easily have been the best disaster/rescue film ever made, for Clarke at least thought things through, being aware, for instance, that people need oxygen in order to breathe. The attitude `Daylight' has to oxygen is just bizarre.
Clarke also observes the golden rule: introduce us to the rag-tag bunch of survivors AFTER disaster strikes, not before. `Daylight' breaks this rule and demonstrates why it should never be broken. The characters have nothing in common apart from the fact that they will one day be thrown together by a freak accident - so when the film shows us their lives, one by one, we feel not so much like an audience following a story, as a class memorising stuff for a future exam.
However, the one character we should have been introduced to before the explosion - the one played by Sylvester Stallone - we didn't meet until afterwards. I don't get it.
As it is Sylvester Stallone is just one of a dozen or so people who spend every minute of their lives, bellowing, shouting, screaming and belly-aching, at everyone else. This constant high-decibel panic is ugly, dramatically enervating and, to be honest, not in the least bit realistic. People trapped together in danger of their lives do NOT, as a rule, spend the entire time at each others' throats. When the mayor of New York wanted to let the survivors die in order to keep the city's transport system alive, I, for one, was on her side.
Then there are the flagrant violations of the laws of physics. A giant fireball whips through a sealed tunnel and leaves ten people and a dog with enough oxygen to live on. The pressure of the Hudson river compresses the air in the non-airtight tunnel so that its pressure is greater than that of the river that pressurised it. It's like the way boulders behave in Road Runner cartoons. (Except that in the cartoons it's a deliberate joke.) A dog dives underwater (itself impossible) and not only doesn't die, but doesn't get wet. With one bound, Sylvester Stallone is free. That type of thing.
Unless you want to dive to the very bottom of this genre, I wouldn't bother.
Clarke also observes the golden rule: introduce us to the rag-tag bunch of survivors AFTER disaster strikes, not before. `Daylight' breaks this rule and demonstrates why it should never be broken. The characters have nothing in common apart from the fact that they will one day be thrown together by a freak accident - so when the film shows us their lives, one by one, we feel not so much like an audience following a story, as a class memorising stuff for a future exam.
However, the one character we should have been introduced to before the explosion - the one played by Sylvester Stallone - we didn't meet until afterwards. I don't get it.
As it is Sylvester Stallone is just one of a dozen or so people who spend every minute of their lives, bellowing, shouting, screaming and belly-aching, at everyone else. This constant high-decibel panic is ugly, dramatically enervating and, to be honest, not in the least bit realistic. People trapped together in danger of their lives do NOT, as a rule, spend the entire time at each others' throats. When the mayor of New York wanted to let the survivors die in order to keep the city's transport system alive, I, for one, was on her side.
Then there are the flagrant violations of the laws of physics. A giant fireball whips through a sealed tunnel and leaves ten people and a dog with enough oxygen to live on. The pressure of the Hudson river compresses the air in the non-airtight tunnel so that its pressure is greater than that of the river that pressurised it. It's like the way boulders behave in Road Runner cartoons. (Except that in the cartoons it's a deliberate joke.) A dog dives underwater (itself impossible) and not only doesn't die, but doesn't get wet. With one bound, Sylvester Stallone is free. That type of thing.
Unless you want to dive to the very bottom of this genre, I wouldn't bother.