Poseidon (2006) — Review

I have watched the 2006 Poseidon three times. That is 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 is not a complaint. That is the pitch. Wolfgang Petersen took the bones of the original, stripped out what does not translate to a modern audience, and built a lean survival film. It works. It is not better than the original and it is not trying to be. It is the same story modernized.

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 is there. After that, I am better off going back to the 1972 version. That is not a knock on the remake. It is the structural difference between a film with ensemble depth and a film with ensemble efficiency. Both have their place. The remake earns its 7 by being competent at exactly what it is trying to do, and the rating reflects that competence honestly.

The Director

Wolfgang Petersen earned the right to make 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, which is essentially 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 stunning. The flooded corridors feel claustrophobic in a way the 1972 sets could not 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 does not 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 appropriately. His firefighter background gives him practical authority during the climb. His former-mayor status gives him social authority. He is 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.

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 could not show what the 2006 film shows. The remake’s superior wave sequence is the strongest argument for its existence. If you are 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 could not.

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 are 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 is 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 does not milk the deaths the way the 1972 version did, and that is both a strength and a weakness. The pacing benefits. The emotional weight does not.

What It Loses

The religious framework is gone. There is no Reverend Scott shaking his fist at the sky. There is no philosophical question about whether God helps those who help themselves. The 2006 Poseidon is a survival film, not a parable. That removes a layer the original film cared about. Hackman’s Scott was the philosophical engine of the 1972 movie, and his death meant something theologically. Lucas’s Dylan Johns is just a competent guy who gets people out alive. He does not represent 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 is not 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 could not match. When the survivors swim through flooded corridors, the audience can see what is around them in a way the original could not 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 is 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, no awards traction, and was dwarfed at the box office that summer by The Da Vinci Code, X-Men: The Last Stand, and Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest. Petersen has said in interviews that the studio pressure to spend money on effects rather than character development pushed the film away from what he originally wanted. The result is technically impressive and emotionally thin, which is the opposite of what made the 1972 film work.

The Verdict

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 does not reveal new layers on rewatch the way the original does. The setpieces are still good the second time. They are still good the third time. By the fourth time you have memorized them and there is 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 is the actual difference between the two films, and the rating reflects that they are both worth the time they ask for. The remake asks for ninety-eight minutes and is worth two or three full viewings. The original asks for one hundred seventeen minutes and is worth a dozen. Both films honor the time they request, which is the standard that makes both of them 7s.

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FAQ

How does this compare to the 1972 original?

The 1972 Poseidon Adventure is the founding document of the 1970s disaster genre. The remake is a structural copy with the religion stripped out, the runtime cut, and the effects upgraded. Both films land at 7 on the rewatch test for different reasons. The 1972 version has more depth and worse pacing. The 2006 version has better pacing and less depth. The comparison is instructive. See the Poseidon Adventure (1972) review for the companion piece.

Is Poseidon a remake or a reimagining?

It is a remake. The basic plot, the rogue wave, the New Year’s Eve setting, the ship called Poseidon, the trapped survivors climbing up through an inverted ship to reach the hull, all of these come directly from the 1972 film and the 1969 Paul Gallico novel that the original was based on. Petersen modernized the framing and stripped the religious elements, but the structural skeleton is the same story.

Why did Poseidon fail at the box office?

Several reasons compounded. The budget was too high for a film without a major star carrying it. The competition that summer was brutal (The Da Vinci Code, X-Men: The Last Stand, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest). The reviews were mixed. Audiences who remembered the 1972 original did not see a compelling reason to watch the remake. The film made money in raw terms but lost money against its production and marketing costs.

Did Wolfgang Petersen want to make this film?

Yes, but the version he wanted to make and the version the studio wanted were different. Petersen has said he wanted more character work and less spectacle. Warner Bros. wanted spectacle to justify the budget. The version that got made is closer to what the studio wanted than what Petersen wanted, which is one reason the film feels emotionally thin compared to Petersen’s other work like Das Boot and The Perfect Storm.

How accurate is the rogue wave?

Rogue waves are real and can reach ninety feet or more in the open ocean. They have been documented hitting cruise ships and oil platforms, sometimes with serious damage. The size and impact shown in Poseidon is at the upper end of plausible but not impossible. Modern ships are designed to survive rogue wave impacts that would have capsized older vessels, though catastrophic capsizing under the right conditions remains a real risk.

Why is Richard Dreyfuss’s character gay in this version?

The character is given a suicidal motivation rooted in his partner leaving him for a younger man. Making the character gay updates the relationship dynamic for a 2006 audience and provides a reason for him to be on the cruise alone. The film does almost nothing with the setup beyond the introduction, which is one of its weaker choices. The character could have been straight, lonely, and recently dumped, and the function in the plot would be identical.

How is the ship inversion sequence so realistic?

The sequence combines large-scale practical sets that physically rotated with CGI for the water and falling objects. The set was built on a gimbal and could rotate ninety degrees during filming, so actors were genuinely climbing inverted geometry. The water and the wave itself were CGI, but the human-scale action in the ballroom during the capsizing was practical. The combination is what sells the realism.

Who survives at the end?

Six survivors make it out: Dylan Johns, Robert Ramsey, Jennifer Ramsey, Christian, Maggie, and her son Conor. Richard Nelson, Elena, Lucky Larry, and several minor characters die during the climb. The survivor count matches the 1972 film, which appears to be intentional.

Is the remake worth watching if I have seen the 1972 original?

Yes, once. The remake is a different filmmaking approach to the same story, and the comparison is instructive. The wave sequence and the inversion are genuinely impressive and worth seeing. After one viewing, the film has shown you what it has, and there is not much reason to return. If you have to pick one, pick the 1972 version. If you can watch both, do.