The Poseidon Adventure (1972)

The Poseidon Adventure (1972)

Dirs. Ronald Neame / Irwin Allen (uncredited)

Revellers on board the luxury cruise liner Poseidon enjoy their New Year's Eve party oblivious to the giant party-pooping wave that's thundering toward them... until it hits!

Produced by master of disaster flicks Irwin Allen, Poseidon is a thoroughly enjoyable but admittedly pretty awful journey from the bowels of hell to the light of day for a small and varied collection of individuals who realise that they must band together if they're to have any hope of escape.

With plenty of rationalising and moralising along the way the ensemble cast do their best with the material, and by the end we know exactly why each character was included and what basic emotion they were required to appeal to, a task that most of them do rather well, I'm happy to say.

I know that it's basically trash given the big screen treatment, but I love it. Ernest Borgnine, Gene Hackman, Shelley Winters and Roddy McDowall all together on a sinking ship? Hell, yes.

Poseidon (2006)

Dir. Wolfgang Petersen

The modernisation of the Poseidon story removed the word 'Adventure' from the title, but more importantly it lost a lot of the heart from the content.

Looked at objectively, it isn't terrible; it's fine on a technical level, but feels passionless.

Subjectively, I feel it's less engaging and the characters aren't as interesting - they're still allocated particular roles, but their impact is lessened and the majority of them exist more for simple plot convenience than as useful vehicles to elicit viewer pathos.

Like so many things in the world of film, what audiences wanted from disaster movies (and what producers thought audiences wanted) had changed. I don't have enough knowledge of the genre to pinpoint when it happened, but at a rough guess I'd say it was complete by the time Independence Day (1996) came out, so that would maybe put the start of it in the preceding years, the late 80s to early 90s? Action movie clichés had replaced existing classic-era clichés; less time was devoted to story so that more could be given over to blowing shit up; and relatable, flawed protagonists were excised in favour of bankable action heroes.

I could list a dozen reasons why I think the remake isn't as good, but about 50% of them would be subjective, so I'll simply conclude that it is what it is, and not for me. History can do the rest.