Beyond the Poseidon Adventure (1979) Review

The Poseidon is still floating upside down. A tugboat captain boards it looking for salvage, and so does a man with a submarine and a different agenda, and they spend the film in the same corridors.

That premise isn’t unreasonable on its face. What the film does with it is take the one great idea of the original, the inverted ship, and treat it as a set to walk through.

This one is worse than a plain bad movie, because it was handed the best disaster premise of the decade and did nothing with it. Watching two salvage crews stroll through an upside-down ocean liner as if it were a parking garage made me want the 1972 film back on the screen immediately.

It was Irwin Allen’s last disaster production as a director and it lost money. That’s the correct outcome and the end of a cycle he’d personally started.

The 3 is for a competent cast working with nothing. Caine is professional, Savalas is enjoyable, Field is stranded, and the production is adequate. The film has no reason to exist and appears to know it. That’s the most damning thing that can be said about a sequel.

What the Sequel Loses

In the original the inversion is the terrain. The survivors have to climb toward the hull because up is down, and every familiar room has to be re-read as a problem. The dining room with its ceiling underfoot. The propeller shaft tunnel as the deepest point and therefore closest to air.

Here it’s a location. The characters move through the same spaces with no sense that the geometry is wrong, because they’re salvage professionals with lamps, ropes and cutting gear instead of passengers in evening dress.

So the great idea becomes set dressing. The film could be set in a flooded warehouse and lose almost nothing. That’s its biggest failure. I’d have said it was impossible to waste a capsized liner, and somehow this film managed it. There’s also no clock. The original has water rising and a fixed amount of air, and every scene is measured against it. This one has people looking for gold with no particular deadline until the film invents one late.

And the geography isn’t established. The original spends real time teaching you the layout so that the climb makes sense. This one assumes you remember it, which even people who love the first film don’t.

Peter Boyle’s character exists to be a difficult passenger and dies. That’s the entire arc, and Karl Malden is on board for reasons the film never establishes.

The Cast Deserved Better

Michael Caine has been open across his career about taking work for money and has never pretended otherwise. That’s more honest than most and doesn’t make the films better. He’s in professional mode here. Competent, watchable, and giving the material exactly what it’s worth. That isn’t much. His performance in the original Poseidon’s rival films of the period, especially The Man Who Would Be King four years earlier, shows what he does with something worth doing.

Sally Field is a year from Norma Rae and her first Academy Award, and she’s stranded with a character who has no function beyond being present and worried.

Telly Savalas is doing the only interesting thing in the film. He plays the antagonist as a man enjoying himself enormously, with a plan the script barely explains, and he’s clearly aware of what kind of picture he’s in.

Savalas is the only reason I stayed with this. He looks like he’s having a ball, and I’d sooner watch him chew through a half-explained scheme than watch the rest of the cast stand around looking worried. Shirley Knight, Slim Pickens and Shirley Jones are all in it and all wasted. That’s the pattern of the late disaster cycle: assemble names, give none of them anything.

The cast is the film’s only asset and it’s spent on scenes that would work identically with unknown actors.

Why the 1970s Disaster Film Died

The formula ran for most of a decade and exhausted itself by doing exactly this. Take a setting, add a star ensemble, kill some of them, and rely on the situation to generate interest. What the good ones had was a physical problem to solve. The Poseidon had its inversion. The Towering Inferno had height and fire and a real question about how you get people down. Jaws had an absent threat and a boat that was too small. Airport had a hole in a fuselage.

The bad ones had celebrities in peril, and by 1979 the ratio had reversed entirely. The Swarm, Meteor, When Time Ran Out and this were all released within about eighteen months and all failed. Allen produced or directed most of the cycle and most of the collapse. That’s a career worth studying because he wasn’t a bad filmmaker. The Poseidon Adventure and The Towering Inferno are both well constructed. He simply kept going after the idea was used up.

Airplane! arrived the following year and finished the genre off by parodying the 1957 film Zero Hour almost line for line. That worked because the disaster picture had become that formulaic.

The genre came back in the nineties with better effects and the same problem, and the ones that work, Twister and Deep Impact partially excepted, are still the ones with a physical rule at the center.

Is There Anything Worth Seeing?

Two things, because a 3 is a harsh score for a film that harmed nobody.

The production design of the inverted spaces is good. The sets were real, the water work is real, and the physical craft on display is better than the writing. Some of the corridor and engine room material looks convincing in a way effects-heavy films of the period often didn’t.

I’ll give the set builders their due. The water looks heavy, the corridors look wet, and in a better film I’d be praising that engine room work at length. Here it mostly makes me sad, because the crew clearly cared more about this ship than the writers did.

And Savalas is having a properly good time. His scenes with Caine have a friction the script didn’t supply, two actors playing a rivalry they’ve invented themselves out of nothing.

There’s also curiosity value. It’s the last film of a cycle that dominated a decade, made by the man who built the cycle, and it fails in a way that explains why the cycle ended.

That’s a legitimate reason to watch something once. It’s not a reason to recommend it.

The original is available and is a well-constructed suspense film, and anybody drawn to this one should simply watch that again instead.

The Two Sequels Problem

There’s a second Poseidon sequel nobody remembers, and its existence explains something about how this one came to be. The 1972 film was an enormous hit, one of the highest-grossing pictures of its year, and a sequel was inevitable. What’s unusual is that Allen waited seven years, by which point the cycle he’d built was collapsing and the audience had moved on. By 1979 the disaster film had been running for most of a decade and had passed through parody into exhaustion. A sequel to the film that started it, arriving as the last entry in the cycle, is a strange object: nostalgic for something the audience had recently grown tired of.

There was also a later television remake in 2005, and a theatrical remake in 2006 called simply Poseidon. That cost around one hundred and sixty million dollars and lost a great deal of it.

Every one of them makes the same mistake. The remake in particular has better effects, a bigger budget, real water tanks, and no interest at all in the inversion as a problem to be solved. So four separate productions have now taken a premise that generated a good film and reduced it to a setting, which suggests the mistake isn’t accidental but structural: the inversion is easy to photograph and hard to write. Not one of three follow-ups trusted the audience to enjoy working out a route through a ship turned on its head, when that route was the whole reason anybody loved the original. A cop-out, every time.

Should you watch Beyond the Poseidon Adventure?

Only for completeness or curiosity, and I’d still steer you toward the original. The cast is far better than the material, Savalas is the one person enjoying himself, and the upside-down ship that made the first film work is reduced to scenery with no clock running. That’s why it gets a 3: capable actors and real sets thrown at a script that wastes the only idea it inherited. Watch the 1972 film again. That one builds its whole second hour out of a single premise and does it properly.

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