Poseidon (2006) Review
7/10
Official trailer
I’ve watched the 2006 Poseidon three times. That’s the right number for it.
The film is the 1972 Poseidon Adventure with the religion taken out, the runtime cut by twenty minutes, and the water effects upgraded by thirty-four years of digital filmmaking. That’s the pitch. Wolfgang Petersen took the bones of the original, stripped out what doesn’t translate to a modern audience, and built a lean survival film. It works.
It’s the same story modernized, and it’s not trying to beat the original.
The 7 reflects what three viewings have confirmed. The first viewing is satisfying. The second viewing confirms what the first showed. The third viewing exhausts what’s there. After that, I’m better off going back to the 1972 version.
That’s the structural difference between a film with ensemble depth and a film with ensemble efficiency. Both have their place. The remake gets its 7 by being competent at exactly what it’s trying to do, and the rating reflects that competence.
The Director
Wolfgang Petersen was the right director for this movie.
He directed Das Boot, the greatest submarine film ever made and a study in how to keep an audience inside a confined disaster for two and a half hours. He directed The Perfect Storm, a Poseidon-adjacent maritime disaster film. He directed Air Force One, In the Line of Fire, Outbreak, and Troy. The man knows how to build tension in tight spaces and he knows how to keep a thriller moving.
Poseidon is the work of a director who has done this before. The water sequences are technically excellent. The flooded corridors feel claustrophobic in a way the 1972 sets couldn’t quite achieve. When the wave hits, the camera tracks through the ship as the world inverts, and you feel the weight of the disaster in a way that practical effects could only suggest in 1972. Petersen has spent his career figuring out how to make confined spaces feel both physically real and emotionally suffocating.
Poseidon is the application of that skill to material that asks for both.
The Cast
Josh Lucas leads as Dylan Johns, a professional gambler. The character is a loner with hidden depths, played as competent and reserved. Lucas does what the script asks. The script doesn’t ask for much. Kurt Russell plays Robert Ramsey, former mayor of New York and former firefighter, traveling with his daughter Jennifer. Russell carries the most weight in the cast and the film leans on him properly. His firefighter background gives him practical authority during the climb. His former-mayor status gives him social authority.
He’s the closest the remake has to a Reverend Scott figure, minus the philosophical baggage.
Emmy Rossum plays Jennifer Ramsey, Russell’s daughter, traveling with her fiancé Christian. Rossum was twenty when she shot this, fresh off Phantom of the Opera. She brings real presence to a thin role.
Mike Vogel plays Christian, Jennifer’s fiancé. The character exists to be in love with Jennifer and to occasionally do something useful. Vogel manages both. Richard Dreyfuss plays Richard Nelson, a suicidal gay architect whose partner just left him. He boards the cruise planning to jump overboard and dies before he can.
The character has the most interesting setup in the film. The film does almost nothing with it. Dreyfuss gives the role more than the script earned.
Jacinda Barrett plays Maggie, a single mother traveling with her ten-year-old son Conor. The maternal protection angle works because Barrett commits to it. The son exists to be in danger. Kevin Dillon plays Lucky Larry, an obnoxious passenger who exists to be obnoxious and die. The film knows what he is and so does the audience. His death is predictable and earned. Mia Maestro plays Elena, a stowaway who joins the survivor group. Her function is to add stakes for Christian. She does.
Andre Braugher gets one scene as the captain and dies in it. The casting is wasted. Braugher could have carried a much larger role and the film gives him three minutes.
Nothing in the cast is squandered like Andre Braugher. He walks on with the authority of a man who could run the whole ship, and the script kills him off before he gets a second scene. Give that part to a lesser actor and I’d shrug. Give it to Braugher and I feel robbed.
For Writers
The remake’s ensemble approach is a lesson in compression that’s both upsides and downsides. Petersen has fewer characters than the 1972 film and gives each one less screen time. The pace gain is real. The character depth loss is also real. The decision was made deliberately, and the decision is defensible, but the cost is visible in every death scene.
Compare Belle Rosen’s swim in 1972 (a character death the audience has been earning for ninety minutes) with the equivalent death scene in 2006 (a character we met an hour ago and barely registered). Both deaths are technically functional. Only one of them lands. If you write ensemble casts, decide how much screen time each character needs before they start dying. The minimum is higher than you think. Compression without investment produces deaths that read as plot points instead of as losses.
The Wave
The set piece that sells the film. A rogue wave, ninety feet tall, hits the ship broadside during the New Year’s Eve celebration. The capsizing sequence runs about five minutes and the camera moves through the inverting ballroom as objects fall, people drop, and the world reorients ninety degrees. The CGI is good enough to sell the impossibility of what is happening, and Petersen’s blocking keeps the audience oriented even as the geometry changes.
The original film had to cut away during the capsizing because the technology of 1972 couldn’t show what the 2006 film shows.
The remake’s superior wave sequence is the strongest argument for its existence. If you’re watching the remake for one reason, this is the reason. The sequence is six and a half minutes of sustained spatial chaos that the 1972 version would have given anything to film and couldn’t.
The capsizing is the sequence I’d show anybody who doubts Petersen. The ballroom tips and I lose track of which way is up right along with the passengers, yet I always know where everybody is standing. That sequence carries a big share of the 7 by itself.
The Climb
The survivor group follows the same basic structure as the 1972 film: gather, identify a path up, fight obstacles, lose members, reach the hull.
The remake’s specific obstacles are different and generally more elaborate. An elevator shaft sequence where survivors have to climb across a vertical drop with an unstable elevator car descending toward them. An engine room flooding sequence where the only path forward requires holding breath through submerged passages. A hull-walking sequence outside the ship in open water that the 1972 film never attempted.
The setpieces work. They’re the reason to watch the film. Petersen knows how to stage a confined action sequence and the cinematography by John Seale, who shot Mad Max: Fury Road and The English Patient and won an Oscar for the latter, gives every scene visual coherence even when the lighting is by emergency LED. The film looks better than it has any right to, and the production design by William Sandell builds an inverted ship that feels structurally plausible at every level.
You can map the route the survivors take. The geography is consistent.
The character deaths in these sequences are mostly perfunctory.
Lucky Larry dies because he’s Lucky Larry. The captain dies offscreen between scenes. The deaths that matter are Dreyfuss’s character at the end and one survivor lost in the elevator shaft. The film doesn’t milk the deaths the way the 1972 version did, and that’s both a strength and a weakness. The pacing benefits. The emotional weight doesn’t.
What It Loses
The religious structure is gone. There’s no Reverend Scott shaking his fist at the sky and no argument about whether God helps those who help themselves. The 2006 Poseidon is a survival film and nothing more. I miss Hackman’s Scott more than I expected to. His death meant something theologically, and it gave the 1972 film a spine. Lucas’s Dylan Johns is a competent guy who gets people out alive, and he doesn’t stand for anything bigger.
The ensemble depth is also reduced. The 1972 film spent thirty minutes introducing ten characters before the wave hit. The 2006 film hits the wave inside the first fifteen minutes. The pace gain costs character investment. When people die, you feel the loss, but not the way you felt it watching Belle Rosen swim through that corridor.
The Rogo marriage subplot has no equivalent. Mike and Linda Rogo were the emotional backbone of the original. The remake has no married couple at that depth. Maggie and her son substitute for that emotional weight, and the substitution is weaker. A mother protecting her child is a default emotional appeal. A long marriage between two flawed adults who love each other anyway isn’t a default. The 1972 film reached for something specific. The 2006 film settled for something easier.
What It Gains
Pacing. The film is ninety-eight minutes. The original was one hundred and seventeen. Twenty minutes of philosophical setup and ensemble introduction got cut, and the remake is the better movie for that runtime if what you want is the survival sequence. The effects are obviously a generation ahead. Water behaves like water. The inversion of the ship is a sustained set piece that the 1972 film couldn’t match. When the survivors swim through flooded corridors, the audience can see what’s around them in a way the original couldn’t show.
The film also trusts the audience more. The 1972 version explained its themes. The 2006 version lets the action carry the meaning. People who like restraint in their disaster films will prefer the remake.
People who like ensemble character work will prefer the original. The remake is the more contemporary film by every measure of contemporary filmmaking, and a viewer who came to disaster cinema after 2000 will probably find the remake more comfortable than the original on first watch.
The Box Office
The film cost roughly one hundred sixty million dollars to produce. It grossed one hundred eighty-one million worldwide. Studios call that a flop. After marketing costs and theater splits, the film lost money for Warner Bros.
The mismatch between cost and quality is the structural problem.
The film is competent. It’s not transcendent. A competent disaster film at one hundred sixty million has to be a massive crossover hit to recoup, and Poseidon was never going to be that. It got mixed reviews and no awards traction, and The Da Vinci Code, X-Men: The Last Stand, and Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest dwarfed it at the box office that summer.
Petersen has said in interviews that the studio pressure to spend money on effects instead of character development pushed the film away from what he originally wanted. The result is technically impressive and emotionally thin, the opposite of what made the 1972 film work.
Is Poseidon Adventure worth watching?
A 7. Same as the original, for different reasons. The 1972 film has more depth and worse pacing. The 2006 film has better pacing and less depth. They balance out. Watch both and you have a complete experience of what this story is and how filmmaking changed in thirty-four years.
Three viewings of the remake is enough. The film doesn’t reveal new layers on rewatch the way the original does. The setpieces are still good the second time. They’re still good the third time. By the fourth time you’ve memorized them and there’s no reason to keep watching. The 1972 version, by contrast, has paid me back a dozen viewings and counting because the ensemble work is dense enough to notice new details every time.
That’s why both films land on 7 for me.
The remake asks for ninety-eight minutes and gives me two or three rounds of great set pieces before it’s spent. The original asks for one hundred seventeen and keeps paying out for a dozen. I wish Warner had let Petersen spend some of that money on the people in the water, because with ten more minutes of Dreyfuss this could have been an 8.
