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Rating:  -
A passenger ship, on her way to the scrap yard is pushed to her limits by the new owners to save on the dismantling fees. A tidal wave hits her, flipping her over so that all the internal rooms are upside down.
Rating: -
I was very pleased with the quality of the movie and the expedient service. Thank you!
Rating:  -
I am somewhat stunned that the prevailing sentiment about this film is so overwhelmingly positive. Perhaps it is a cultural effect or wistfulness for the 1970's. If so, I was not similarly affected inasmuch as I had not seen this movie until now (2008). The film lived up to its reputation for being an expensive disaster film with an all star cast. I found the special effects (especially the giant wave) to be amazingly good for the time, and was entirely entertained by the film until the ship capsized.
The film is ponderous, preachy, and pretentious. Worst of all it took extremely talented actors who I normally enjoy watching and wasted their talents, particularly in two specific instances. In a nutshell, I had a Gene Hackman and Shelley Winters overdose in short order. Disregarding the whole contrivance of Hackman's character as a questioning-pseudo agnostic priest with a foul mouth and bad temper, I couldn't get past the excessive overacting, which was clearly not helped by the extremely unnatural dialogue screenwriter Wendell Mayes foisted on the cast. In this film Hackman makes William Shatner look positive sedate even at his eye-rolling extreme. I couldn't help but feel that "Reverend Scott" found his proper Biblical locale when he fell into the lake of fire.
Likewise Shelley Winters, while seemingly comfortable in her role as a whiny matron (and former swimming champ), was perfectly matched with Hackman and seemed to be in constant competition with him for who could be most over the top. I thought her saccharine dialogue with her husband about never seeing their grandson was as bad as it could get. I was wrong: a few minutes later after showing why she was the only one on the ship trained to swim down stairwells and through doors (huh?), she abruptly has a coronary event of epic proportions. I started keeping an eye on the running time at this point.
I found Ernest Borgnine as a policeman to give a much better (but by no means understated) performance, but found the setup of him on the ship with his wife and former prostitute Stella Stevens to be better suited to a sitcom than a serious drama. And there's the problem: this entire film is one giant soap opera at sea with wholly unbelievable characters, and like a soap opera the talented cast's efforts are largely wasted as the underlying material isn't very good. On the positive side, I thought Leslie Nielsen was quite good as the Captain: it's a welcome reminder of his past as a "serious" actor.
I know this is a beloved cultural icon, and I can see that it would have been more impressive to see in the theater, but I just couldn't get into it. It is an interesting glimpse into the precursor of the 1970's disaster movies, which I actually like in general. "The Poseidon Adventure" is technically infeasible: for example, the fire in the closed engine room would remove all the oxygen in short order, rendering the entire cast unable to breathe. Not that that's a bad thing. Worse than technical inaccuracy, though, it is relentlessly preachy and dwells superficially on the condition of man and particularly human suffering. The problem is that this is a disaster flick by Irwin Allen and Ronald Neame, not Sir John Gielgud in William Shakespeare's Julius Caesar.
I like a good disaster flick or B-movie as much as the next person (and more than most), but I found "The Poseidon Adventure" to be bloated, ponderous, and worst of all, boring. I recommend this for viewing as a cultural icon of the 1970's: no more, no less.
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Every New Years's Eve, I watch this film to remind me that "life does matter very much", a very profound line spoken by Reverend Scott. I also like to be reminded that in a crisis, if a group pulls together, more than likely there will be a desirable outcome.
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Only the great Irwin Allen could produce a movie that artfully blends soap opera, drama, comedy and suspense. Especially memorable performances by Gene Hackman, Stella Stevens, Shelley Winters and Ernest Borgnine.
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