2 out of 5

Directed by: Ronald Neame

The first 15 or so minutes of The Poseidon Adventure are an excellent reminder of the potential of commodity in filmmaking. Writing this in 2025, I have had occasion to wonder – as streaming services have caused TV to lean in to second-screen structured storytelling; as the current theater-going economy is mostly given over to franchises and tentpoles that don’t take many narrative risks – if mainstream movies were ever “better” at this sort of thing, or if I have just been seeing past classics through nostalgia lenses.

But no: in those 15 minutes, director Ronald Neame and book adapters Stirling Silliphant and Wendell Mayes manage to introduce us to all the principle characters, the ship, and set some stakes for the crisis to come – ocean liner S. S. Poseidon, out on its final cruise, is capsized by a giant tidal wave – and do so with all that being obvious, but not trite. This general approach is the norm, of course, but movies / shows of the modern era tend to boil this down into something with zero nuance and zero patience; it might take the same amount of time, but it’s treated with a perfunctory vibe that’s likely equivalent to whatever one line of direction or single-adjective character description was offered to an actor. Neame and editor Harold F. Kress don’t do anything clever to transition from aging, Israel-bound couple Manny and Belle (Jack Albertson, Shelley Winters) to “god wants you to save yourselves” reverend Frank Scott (Gene Hackman) to convenient ship-obsessive kid Robin (Eric Shea), but the setups are given space enough for each actor and scene to do something beyond line delivery, and allow for a roundhouse of dramatic, comedic, and emotional beats. Again, it’s not championship writing by any means, but it’s impressively functional without feeling especially pandering. In other words: movies used to be able to do a lot in two hours – or even fifteen minutes!

Unfortunately, that sense of precision goes away pretty soon after things get going. During the New Year’s celebration, the ship’s captain (shoutout to a cameoing Leslie Nielsen) – having been forced to speed up the trip by corporate overlords – cannot divert from an underground-earthquake-caused tsunami, and things for the passengers, mostly gathered in the large dining room, go from bad to badder to worse as the ship completely flips, and constant explosions create a need to climb “up” to the ship’s bottom to escape incoming waters.

While this is an exciting setup for our list of celebs to sweat and shout through, and production design and cinematographer Harold E. Stine do a great job of keeping the settings claustrophobic and tangible, beyond the stunning dining room escape, the movie sets into tedium, which lets the now tedious dialogue – the characters being established so precisely, when the movie keeps repeating such scenes with the same amount of space, it undermines the tension and accomplishes nothing new – add to that tedium; the movie’s thinness as a blockbuster is revealed by starting off with a distracting bang and then having nowhere much to go from there.

Some of this is likely due to a modern viewer’s expectations of onscreen calamity outpacing what was technically possible in the 70s – shows like 9-1-1 can do boat capsizing eps ten times over and bigger than Poseidon Adventure, for example – but I was around watching movies during some earlier decades, with several of those still surviving consistent viewings; The Poseidon Adventure reeks a bit too much of doing-something-because-we-can filmmaking, lacking a spark that makes it feel significant beyond its time – the Independence Day of its era. (Allowing that plenty of people rewatch and enjoy ID4, as I’m sure plenty do with PA.)

The unsubtle subtext of the movie’s interactions are a bit more entertaining than the actual sequences: it rejects religion by letting those sticking with traditional beliefs die; the calamity is arguably caused by capitalist greed and the ship’s moneybags-man is another spokesperson for those who end up perishing; the brotherly love of the hippie movement – represented by groovy ship bandleader Nonnie (Carol Lynley) – provides zero solace; the law (Ernest Borgnine) means well but don’t know nothin’; even love, which normally saves the day, is fated to perish. And heck, even your reward for sticking to your principles is likely a thankless death so others can benefit. Wee!

Pairing this with the various escape room sequences – climb upside down stairs; get through the gas-filled kitchens – sounds right on paper. However, backing it all behind Hackman’s barking reverend is what I think dates and (no pun intended) sinks it: we split the passengers between those who want to wait for rescue and those willing to climb for it in that first, exciting sequence. Hackman’s no-nonsense is amusingly unhelpful at that point, but it works within the film’s logic. After that, the fact that everyone else is still helpless is what creates that aforementioned tedium: perhaps it was more fun for 70s audiences to imagine themselves as the sole hero, telling everyone how to not touch hot surfaces, but for me, at least, it was simply tiring, and extended simple tasks to time-wasting ones, which furthermore makes the “sudden” appearance of rushing water in any given scene necessitate those quotes.

I’d maintain that The Poseidon Adventure is worth watching up through its first escape; up until then, it’s a prime example of concise but effective blockbuster filmmaking. I’m normally not a proponent of only half watching films, but it truly does go on repeat after that point, just on a smaller and smaller scale and to diminishing returns.