The Poseidon Adventure (1972)
Directed by Ronald Neame
When their ocean liner capsizes, a group of passengers struggle to survive and escape.
12 connections found
View:
12 connections, in both directions
What critics compared The Poseidon Adventure to
Inspired by popular pseudoscientific claims that the Mayan calendar predicts the world will end on Dec. 12, 2012, the film is a sort of disaster-genre greatest hits collection, gathering the tidal waves from "The Perfect Storm" and "The Poseidon Adventure," the temblors from "Earthquake," the volcanoes from "Volcano" and "Dante's Peak," the fireballs from "Armageddon," and other special-effects traumas into that paradoxical form of entertainment that allows viewers to escape their real-life woes by imagining something far, far worse.
He has become the modern day “Master of Disaster,” a title once bestowed on filmmaker Irwin Allen thanks to the success of his back-to-back blockbusters The Poseidon Adventure and The Towering Inferno.
Rumoured to cost some $260 million (U.S.) – figure most of it went for CGI – 2012 liberally lifts from the Irwin Allen playbook, especially The Poseidon Adventure, right down to the cruise ship turned turtle by a gigantic tsunami.
Even “master of disaster” Irwin Allen liked to shake up the status quo in such films as The Poseidon Adventure and The Towering Inferno, but Emmerich has no imagination: His A-listers live, his support players die.
When the ill-fated cruise ship of The Poseidon Adventure (1972)?a film Emmerich and co-writer Harald Kloser reference here more than once?was capsized by a tidal wave, my 10-year-old self may have understood that flesh-and-blood stuntmen, not actors, were hanging off those upside-down cocktail tables, but I still feared for them and, by extension, for the film's characters.
In fact, Soderbergh has cited the Allen-produced The Poseidon Adventure (1972) and The Towering Inferno (1974) as inspiratuons, though the Allen-directed The Swarm(1978) may be closer than anything else—only with a greater degree of governing intelligence and considerably more polish.
Mix into this some The Poseidon Adventure (1972) reminiscences and maybe even Jacques Tourneur’s late period Vincent Price schlock War-Gods of the Deep (1965) and this sometimes-competent underwater creature feature doesn’t appear to have an original concept or idea lurking anywhere in its superficial recesses.
Emmerich is more of a kindred spirit to the late schlockmeister producer Irwin Allen ("The Swarm," "The Poseidon Adventure") than he is to Michael Moore, and "Day" is far more effective as a guilty-pleasure popcorn extravaganza than as any kind of a serious political statement.
I almost lost it when someone yelled, “It’s a wall of water coming toward New York City!” because that’s the most laughable line in The Poseidon Adventure (1972), too.
Advertisement
It’s a madhouse sequence which plays like Pasolini’s version of The Poseidon Adventure (1972), and hits a zenith the remainder of the film doesn’t quite reach.
Somewhere between producer Irwin Allen ( The Towering Inferno , The Poseidon Adventure ) and director Michael Bay (the lamentable Transformers series) there is Roland Emmerich, the gleeful and unapologetic German-born orchestrator of apocalyptic mass destruction.
In Moonfall, he kind of does both, adopting tropes largely invented by ‘70s disaster king, Irwin Allen (The Poseidon Adventure, The Swarm, The Towering Inferno) and giving them a modern, larger than life update.
In fact, "San Andreas" wants to be "The Poseidon Adventure," but it doesn't have Gene Hackman as a tough-talking minister and Shelley Winters as a champion swimmer gone to seed.
The most fertile wave of celluloid disaster porn came in the 1970s, when maestros of mayhem like producer Irwin Allen churned out star-studded cataclysms like The Poseidon Adventure and The Towering Inferno .
With nowhere to go but into the submerged portions of the cave system, our clutch of disposable characters make stupid mistakes and die one at a time, slasher-style, though the film's obvious debt is owed rather to the disaster films typified by the work of producer Irwin Allen in the 1970s (the sheer quantity of water particularly reminded me of The Poseidon Adventure ), especially given the incredibly expected way that Josh and Frank patch their torn relationship as a direct result of their shared danger.
Advertisement
Famed blockbuster filmmaker Irwin Allen would be pleased as punch to see that his tradition of big, loud action flicks that pits man against nature-induced disaster, such as "The Poseidon Adventure" and "The Towering Inferno," is still alive.
Maybe it’s that flooded ballroom scene from 1972’s “The Poseidon Adventure.”