As everyone correctly fawned over GQ‘s excellent profile of Keanu Reeves last month, there was one throwaway detail in the piece that I couldn’t stop thinking about. In introducing the actor’s friend and occasional “Swedish Dicks” co-star Peter Stormare, GQ noted that the actor once “went to China and made a movie about saving sea turtles, and then, before the film was supposed to open, the Chinese government decided there was some issue with Stormare’s work visa and confiscated the turtle movie. It has never been released.”
Wait, what? How could no one have wanted to know more about what went down?
With advance apologies to my Editor In Chief who will probably wonder what I’m going down this rabbit hole, I had to try and dig up some information about this movie. And the more I found, the harder it was to pin down the details.
First, the film seems to have two titles it’s known by: “Attack Of The Sea Turtle” or “Poseidon Code” (the latter being the more popular name). According to China Daily, “Poseidon Code” did have a premiere in the country on June 27, 2014 and they reported the story follows “an FBI agent who is involved in a case surrounding a mysterious deep-sea alien found in China.” Telescope Film adds a few more details, revealing this logline: “Scientists and the Chinese Maritime Police race to save sea turtles endangered by criminal gangs and ecological disaster.”
All right, sounds like a timely eco-thriller! But in trying to determine what happened to the film, information is scarce. I couldn’t find out why Stormare’s papers weren’t in order, and why it resulted in action as drastic as completely shelving the movie. To make the mystery even harder to solve, the film’s director Qiao Heping doesn’t have much of a presence on IMDB. The movie itself doesn’t even exist on the site. This isn’t much in the way of official stills, though a handful of promo posters are floating around (see below).
However, Stormare does have one great memory of making the movie, when he actually got to release a sea turtle into the ocean. “I’m gonna remember that moment my entire life,” he told GQ. “That beautiful creature, finding its way into the ocean with the help of two humans.”
As I did a Google deep dive, I was able to dig up the trailer (sorry, the embed doesn’t work, and actually, it looks more like a sizzle reel for distributors). It’s fairly incomprehensible, but it does perhaps give the best reason why “Attack Of The Sea Turtle” aka “Poseidon Code” will never see the light of day — it might just be awful.
