The Poseidon Adventure – 1972 (WINNER)
Alright, we have reached the era of the disaster film, and this was one of the more creative ones. The story is that of an ill-fated ocean cruise ship that encounters a giant tidal wave that flips the massive boat on its head, and slowly sinks. Several of the passengers must make their way through the overturned ship to the engine room. In the propeller shaft, the hull is only an inch thick, and it is their only hope of survival. Along the way, they encounter dead bodies, deadly fires, and rising waters as the cruise-liner goes down.
The effect of the ship rolling over onto its top was appropriately chaotic, but I noticed that a lot of it was accomplished through creative camera angles and quick cuts. Some of the shots when the ship was clearly at a forty-five degree angle, showed people simply shuffling across the floor with the camera turned on its side. They should have been falling, not walking. But they also had a great revolving set that sent stunt men and women sliding across the floor, and yes, falling, crashing through the dangerous debris. It must have been a logistical nightmare to choreograph the whole scene. It was actually mostly impressive, especially considering that it was all done with practical effects. There was no CGI to help create the illusion.
The ten people have to crawl over and under wreckage and through ventilation shafts, all the while trying to stay ahead of the rising water. At one point, the desperate people have to swim through a thirty-five foot submerged passage, and we get to see a tense underwater sequence. The actors were really put through their paces. And no, Shelly Winters swimming was not a special effect.
Intermittently, throughout the film, we are treated to some really cool shots of the overturned boat under the water as explosions rock the ship. This is significant to the plot, especially when the film reaches its climax. The shaking of the vessel is enough to cause the deaths of several characters. Once they reach the engine room, they have to walk on up-side-down catwalks with no railings to hold on to. There is rising water in the chamber with an oil fire blazing on its surface.
But the film really did a pretty good job of creating the illusion of the overturned vessel. The director, Ronald Neame, created a smart but subtle effect by having the camera constantly tilting back and forth just enough to create the illusion of instability, always keeping in our subliminal minds that fact the boat was still on the ocean, rocking with the waves. The movie was fun to watch, and since it was the only movie nominated for the Best Special Effects category, it took home its Oscar. But I think that it was good enough to have won, even if it’d had some competition. Maybe it was all a little campy by today’s standards, but I still enjoyed it.