Poseidon (2006)

The 2006 Poseidon arrives as the third adaptation of Paul Gallico's novel, a remake that strips the 1972 version down to its hull and jetsam. Wolfgang Petersen, a director who once made the sinking of a submarine feel like a moral inquiry, here presides over a luxury liner flipped by a rogue wave in the opening act. What follows is ninety minutes of climbing, swimming, and drowning, executed with the grim efficiency of a safety demonstration. Kurt Russell plays a former mayor and firefighter, Josh Lucas a gambler with a submariner's past, Richard Dreyfuss an architect contemplating the end of things. The supporting cast includes Mía Maestro, Freddy Rodríguez, and Andre Braugher, all competent, all incidental, their presence never once remarked upon by the screenplay. The film simply does not have the time.

There is nothing on the agenda here. The Poseidon is a monument to wealth, and the film regards it with the wide-eyed appreciation of a brochure photographer. No one suggests the ship's opulence is a moral failing. The wave is weather, not consequence, and no character pauses amid the rising water to lament the carbon footprint of transatlantic leisure. The women, Jennifer and Maggie, wait to be rescued or talked into rescuing, their arcs measured in how tightly they grip a railing. Race is not a subject. Class is not a subject. The only subject is the water, and the water is coming in.

This is a lean machine, and lean machines leave little for the cultural ledger. It earned an Academy Award nomination for its visual effects and lost seventy to eighty million dollars for Warner Bros., which feels like a fair trade for a film that asks nothing of us but survival. We classify it accordingly, with the quiet respect owed to a vintage that refuses to pretend it is anything other than what it is. A disaster, plainly labeled.