Wolfgang Petersen was never like Roland Emmerich, nor did he pretend to be, but there are some points in common between the works of these two filmmakers of German origin who have enjoyed the approval of Hollywood by dint of muscular films with excellent commercial performance. Petersen, who died on August 12 at the age of 81, although the news was not made public until this Tuesday, had its moment of splendor in German cinema with ‘The Submarine’ (1981), drama set during World War II inside a submarine with its characteristic metallic groans and sonar sounds.
He had previously made quite a few movies for television, although they were shown in theaters, such as ‘The Chess Player’ (1978), with Bruno Ganz, but it was the success of ‘The Submarine’ and ‘The Neverending Story’ (1984), according to the well-known novel by Michael Ende, which put him on the radar of Hollywood executives.
The first thing he did was ‘Enemy of mine’ (1985), a science fiction film presented at the Sitges festival that year that showed the clashes and alliances of a human (Dennis Quaid) and an alien with a reptilian body (Louis Gossett Jr.) on a lonely planet; it was a curious remodeling of ‘Hell in the Pacific’ (1968), in which an American and a Japanese soldier (Lee Marvin and Toshiro Mifune) did the same thing on a Pacific island during World War II.
In the 90s he leaned towards the thriller and made the more conventional ‘The Night of Broken Glass’ (1991), an intrigue with psychological overtones with Greta Scacchi and Tom Berenger, and the more interesting ‘In the Line of Fire’ (1993 ), with Clint Eastwood in the role of a presidential bodyguard who, after failing to assassinate John Kennedy, has a second chance to save another American president. The taste for cinema more or less linked to the old genre of catastrophes dawned in his filmography with ‘Outbreak’ (1995), a film that today has gained in effectiveness: a monkey carrying a virus similar to Ebola travels by boat from Africa to the United States United and unleashes a terrible pandemic.
Petersen was already entrusted with star casts, and after having Dustin Hoffman and Morgan Freeman in ‘Outbreak’put himself at the service of Harrison Ford in ‘Air force (The President’s plane)’ (1997), a funny delirium, as long as you don’t take it seriously, in which Ford acts as the president ‘action hero’ when a Russian terrorist seizes the plane.
With ‘The Perfect Storm’ (2000), starring George Clooney and Mark Wahlberg, he returned to the idea of disaster films with a certain dramatic undertone, telling the true story of a fishing boat that, in the fall of 1991, faced with what defines the title of the film, the clash of two gigantic waves. His greatest success would come with ‘Troya’ (2004), a luxury peplum plan revision of the story of Helena (Diane Kruger), Paris (Orlando Bloom), Achilles and his heel (Brad Pitt) and Hector (Eric Bana).
His last major production was indeed a classic disaster film, ‘Poseidon’ (2006), neither more nor less than the colorful ‘remake’ of ‘The Adventure of Poseidon’ (1972). But, suddenly, Petersen disappeared from North American cinema and reappeared 10 years later, directing in his country of origin a discreet comedy about four guys willing to take revenge on the bank that cheated them, ‘Four against the bank’ (2016). It was her last film. He suffered from pancreatic cancer.