Ghost Ship
Short description
A salvage crew led by Maureen Epps and Captain Sean Murphy is hired to recover a passenger liner found drifting in the Bering Sea, thousands of miles from where it vanished decades earlier. The ship, an Italian luxury liner, was lost without a distress call, and maritime law allows whoever boards an abandoned vessel in international waters to claim it. Once the crew begins towing it toward harbor, strange events trap them aboard, and they discover the ship is not as deserted as it appeared.
Steve Beck directed the film, his second feature after Thir13en Ghosts the previous year. Mark Hanlon and John Pogue wrote the screenplay, and Robert Zemeckis, Joel Silver and Gilbert Adler produced. Gabriel Byrne and Julianna Margulies head the cast, with Desmond Harrington, Ron Eldard, Isaiah Washington and Karl Urban among the crew. Made for a moderate budget, it earned roughly twice its cost worldwide, a solid commercial result for a horror release.
Audience response was mixed but durable. On IMDb it holds a below-average 5.6 from about 117,000 votes, while on TMDB it sits at 6 out of 10 from a much smaller pool of roughly 2,800. A critics' score of 3.9 out of 10 from 128 reviews places it below even the viewer ratings, suggesting the film found more favor with genre audiences than with reviewers.
What's left behind the scenes
- Filming took place on the Gold Coast in Australia and in Vancouver, Canada, over three months: it began on January 24th and ended on April 24th, 2002.
- The film’s creation story began with a script for sale called “Chimera.” According to this script, the film was supposed to be a relatively bloodless psychological thriller where four members of a rescue team went insane for various reasons and began hunting each other. The action took place on the abandoned ocean liner “Chimera,” which disappeared in the mid-60s and was found in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.
- The photograph of a sinking passenger ship shown to Captain Murphy actually belongs to the severely listing Italian liner “Andrea Doria” after a collision.
- The role of Captain Murphy was originally intended for Brian Cox.
- The dancing on deck and in the ballroom shown in the opening scene was an established tradition on transatlantic liner voyages and was hosted by the captain shortly before the journey's end (“Captain’s Ball”).
- A special shark-proof net was built during filming on the Gold Coast of Australia, as none of the actors were willing to work in the water with them.
- Originally, the opening scene was supposed to show people on the dance floor having their heads severed by a snapped cable, rather than cut in half as in the film. Studio executives were not enthusiastic about this idea and insisted on changes to the script.
- During the filming of the underwater scene at the end of the movie, Emily Browning's clothing consistently floated above her head. To avoid this, a special weight was attached to the actress's skirt.
- The working title of the film was “Chimera,” and Christopher McQuarrie was initially slated to direct, but he soon left the project.
- The design of the enormous passenger ship 'Antonia Graza', which the heroes find themselves on, is based on the luxurious Italian ocean liner 'Andrea Doria', which collided in fog near New York on July 25, 1956, with the Swedish liner 'Stockholm' and sank the following morning.
- According to the captain of the 'Antonia Graza', all their troubles began after they rescued the distressed vessel 'Lorelei'. 'Lorelei' is the name of a famous German poem telling of siren-like women luring ships and sailors to their doom.
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