63) The Poseidon Adventure

The Poseidon Adventure (1972)


Director: Ronald Neame

Starring: Gene Hackman, Ernest Borgnine, Red Buttons, Roddy McDowall, Shelley Winters, Pamela Sue Martin, Eric Shea, Carol Lynley, Stella Stevens, Jack Albertson, Leslie Nielsen

Kate was at college tonight so I had my choice of what to watch. As someone who is spooked by they thought of drowning, I figured she would have little interest in watching The Poseidon Adventure, a film which is pretty much the last hour of Titanic without all the lovey-dovey stuff.

On it's final voyage, the USS Poseidon is hit by a tidal wave on New Years Eve and is overturned. With everything now upside down and the ship filling with water Reverend Frank Scott (Hackman) tries to convince people that there is no option but to go down, which is now up, to the engine room. With the vast majority of passengers preferring to listen to official instructions and stay in the ballroom, Scott sets off with a small bunch of followers including an ex-cop (Borgnine) and his prostitute wife (Stevens), an elderly couple (Winters and Albertson), a folk singer (Lynley), a kindly haberdasher (Buttons) and an unaccompanied young sister and brother (Martin and Shea).

The 1970s saw a bit of a disaster movie phase hit Hollywood. Airport got the ball rolling in 1970, and The Poseidon Adventure saw the craze build momentum. The disaster movie cycle probably hit it's peak in 1974 with the release of The Towering Inferno, Earthquake and Airport 1975. While a few notable disaster films cropped up in the late 1970s, largely the cycle started to flounder with lesser sequels like Airport '77, The Concord... Airport '79 and Beyond the Poseidon Adventure and blockbuster flops like Meteor and When Time Ran Out.... By 1980 the disaster cycle was completed when the Zucker brothers released their comedy Airplane! which spoofed the cliches of the genre.

The Poseidon Adventure is a really poorly written film. It is going for a thrill-a-minute, race-against-the-clock kind of feel, but never really grips you. All of the characters are quite two-dimensional, with literally no character development as the film progresses. Obviously, the narrative of the story takes place over a very short period of time, so you can't expect standard character arcs, but not having investment in the characters takes a bit of the tension out of their struggle for survival. The clear deficiencies in the script make me assume their must have been some decent money on the table to attract the names that appear in this cast.

I'm usually a big fan of Gene Hackman's work, but not so much in this case. I couldn't work out as a viewer whether I was supposed to like him or not. I also was not entirely sure what I was supposed to get out of the fact that he was a minister. The disenfranchised minister is character that has been used before, but this is one of the weakest uses of that character I've seen. You can't even work out why he ever became a minister in the first place. The things he teaches seem to have no relation to the Christian concept of God, he sounds more like a self-help, motivational speaker. He seemed to have no real compassion for people, only frustration that they were dumber than him. This all meant that as a viewer you never really got on his side, making his act of self sacrifice, and cursing of God, at the end of the film a much less potent scene than I'm assuming they were hoping for.

Special mention has to go to Ernest Borgnine who puts in what is undoubtedly one of the all time great shouting performances in this movie. He shouts literally 90% of his lines, even lines which are just part of a conversation. It is quite amazing.

The Poseidon Adventure won an Special Achievement Award for Visual effects at the Oscars, and while they appear dated to our CGI accustomed eyes, they do an admirable job of creating the illusion of a sinking ship through the use of sets, camera angles, sound effects and lots and lots of water. As a result the film also received nominations for cinematography, art-direction and set-direction, editing, sound and musical score. Amazingly the film also won Best Original song for "The Morning After", the song performed by a travelling folk group at the New Years Eve party. Must have been a lean year music-wise.

I'm part of the generation who is only used to seeing Leslie Nielsen in spoof comedies (Naked Gun, Spy Hard, Wrongfully Accused, Dracula: Dead and Loving It), which makes it quite difficult to take him seriously when you see him in an earlier film in a serious role. This is especially difficult in The Poseidon Adventure given he is playing the ship's captain, exactly the type of role you would expect him to show up in if the film was a spoof.

The Poseidon Adventure is a film which were it not for it's quite impressive cast, probably wouldn't rate much of a mention today. It is funny though, because I think the great cast might even hurt this film today, because it alters our expectation. We associate Hackman, Borgnine and Winters with classic films, whereas that is not what The Poseidon Adventure was shooting for. It was a blockbuster popcorn movie. Think a 1970s equivalent of Speed rather than Titanic. If you come into it with the right mindset you'll forgive a lot of this film's weaknesses. But even then, The Poseidon Adventure is ok for what it is, but there are plenty of other films worth seeing before you get to this one.