The Poseidon Adventure (Special Edition)
by Ronald Neame
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DVD Cover Information
Actor: Carol Lynley, Ernest Borgnine, Gene Hackman, Red Buttons, Roddy McDowallDirector: Ronald Neame
Brand: HACKMAN,GENE
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo; Hebrew (Original Language); English (Subtitled); Spanish (Subtitled)
Format: Color, DVD-Video, NTSC, Special Edition, Widescreen
Picture Format: 2.35:1
Running Time: 117 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2006-05-09
Audience Rating: PG (Parental Guidance Suggested)
Studio: 20th Century Fox
Movie Reviews of The Poseidon Adventure (Special Edition)
Movie Review: The Implausible Adventure
Summary: 3 Stars
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.
Summary of The Poseidon Adventure (Special Edition)
Ten survivors struggle to reach safety after an ocean liner capsizes in mid sea.Genre: Feature Film-Action/Adventure
Rating: PG
Release Date: 9-MAY-2006
Media Type: DVD
Hands down, this is the best movie (and was one of the first) to come out of the seemingly endless cycle of disaster movies that dominated box offices during the 1970s. It could even be argued that Titanic owes some of its success to the precedent set by this 1972 blockbuster starring Gene Hackman as a priest who leads a small group of survivors to safety from the bowels of a capsized luxury liner. From its stellar cast to its cheesy, Oscar-winning theme song, The Morning After, the movie has all the ingredients of a popular classic, beginning with a New Year's Eve celebration aboard the ill-fated Poseidon and ending as a pop allegory when the Hackman character becomes a Christ-like martyr. Filmed on spectacular sets where everything down is up and the ship's thick hull points in the direction of salvation, this is "a waterlogged Grand Hotel" (in the words of New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael) that is as entertaining as it is unabashedly brainless. The Poseidon Adventure is filled with performances that rise above the limits of the screenplay. It's also the only movie--unless you count her underwater corpse in Night of the Hunter--that lets Shelley Winters strut her stuff as an aquatic heroine. Who could ask for anything more? --Jeff Shannon
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