Normally, I don't mind when a book is turned into a movie. A movie, even a bad one, usually brings a book a much wider audience. For instance, I was enticed to read All the King's Men by seeing the trailer for the Steven Zaillian-directed remake. The book is now among my favorite novels of all time; the movie is crap (I've never seen the original movie). I will make an exception for Poseidon, which is among the stinkiest pieces of garbage I've ever had the misfortune of sitting through in the theater. Every single thing about it is wrong, ludicrous, cheap, shoddy, and insulting. What's worse? It degrades the value of the classic 1970s Irwin Allen disaster-rama with Gene Hackman, Ernest Borgnine, and Shelly Winters (swimming!) and the Paul Gallico novel. Anyway, Wolfgang Petersen's execrable monument of horse pucky did accomplish one good thing: it brought The Poseidon Adventure back into print. I'd read it once as a kid, and revisited it as an adult, and what I found surprised me. It was really good. (And also, just so you know, the novel came first; this isn't one of those novels-based-on-a-screenplay that are often issued with a film). The plot is high-concept. It's the 1960s and an aging passenger liner, the SS Poseidon, is sailing from Africa without the proper ballast. An undersea earthquake, a heavy swell, and the improperly-balanced ship is capsized. Up is down, and in order to escape, the survivors have to go up, or is that down? This book must have been hell to write. The story focuses on fifteen passengers. You have the obvious ethnic stereotypes, like you'd find in an RKO World War II movie from the 40s. Oddly, though, there are no blacks (though, later, there is a Turk). The characters are: the Reverend Dr. Frank "Buzz" Scott, a former All-American football player turned preacher, who believes in a muscular, almost secular Christianity, where God is the Coach urging us on; Mike Rogo, a NYC detective who hates blacks, homosexuals, and everyone else; Linda Rogo, his awful, foul-mouthed, one-dimensional wife; the Shelbys (Dick and Jane (ha ha), son Robin, and daughter Susan), the typical family from the mid-American Heartland, with a pristine facade with rotting foundations; Hubie Muller, a rake; James Martin, a haberdasher (seriously, with all these similar names, it got annoying); Manny and Bell Rosen, the bickering Jewish couple (natch); Nonnie, the waifish showgirl; Pamela Reid, the girl drunk; and Tony "the Beamer" Bates, the guy drunk. Under the command of Dr. Scott, this disparate group makes their way up, which is actually down, through the twisted, mangled, and darkened ship. What I dug about this novel is its literary pretensions. It has no idea that it's fundamentally pulp, the quintessential beach read. Instead, Gallico writes with Dostoevsky-like aspirations to psychological depth. He utilizes a floating third-person limited point of view, with the narrative point of view jumping from character-to-character, often on the same page (this can be confusing, since I mentioned above, so many of the characters have similar names). Each of the many characters has their own back-story, layers of shading that manage to avoid being facile. Indeed, it's a testament to the author that I didn't fully like any of the characters - they all had those sneaky, too-human dimensions that remove them from the realm of archetypal novelistic-cinematic hero. Interestingly, the author chooses not to allow us to view events from two of the characters. The first character spends much of the first half of the book as a gross caricature; a nasty-mouthed cliche straight out of central casting. Then the character dies, and we learn about his/her background. Thus, he/she is given a postmortem dimension. Quite clever, actually. The other character is the Reverend Dr. Scott. We only learn about him through the eyes of the other characters. Thus, Gallico sneakily creates a mythical character before our eyes: a man made up of all the things others project upon him. I liked the Scott character. I like how he remained opaque throughout; like a hologram, he looked different according to the angle at which you viewed him. I also liked his simplistic, Book of James-style faith+works theology: 'God wants winners! God loves triers. He did not create you in His image to run second. He has no use for quitters, whiners or beggars. Every trial you're called upon to endure is an act of worship. Respect and stand up for yourselves and you will be respecting and standing up for Him. Let Him know that if He can't help you, you've got the guts and the will to go it alone. Fight for yourselves and He will be fighting at your side uninvited. When you succeed, it is because you've accepted Him, and He is in you. When you dog it, you've denied Him.' His fate is something you can't even guess at, and it's a revealing moment. Unlike the movies, which are both Rube Goldberg-like obstacle courses, with one barrier to be surmounted after another, the book is much more interested in the characters. Sure, there are challenges: busted staircases; a swim through the engine room; a climb among the scaffolds. But the main challenges are psychological. The greatest challenge each character faces is their self. One of the great feats of the novel is its spacial awareness. Gallico does a heroic job of attempting to describe the world these characters inhabit. It'd be hard enough for a writer to describe an ocean liner; it's that much harder to describe it upside down and tangled up. In the chaos of the dining saloon they had not even been aware of the nature of what remained of the grand staircase, emerging at its widest point from the pool of oily water, its golden handrails and carpeted steps curving upwards to the ceiling where it looked so utterly different that none of them any longer recognized it for what it was. It had become simply a part of that nightmare in which chairs and tables hung from the roof and lights were thrown up from the glass floor...The steps now hung upside-down from the ceiling and the complete uselessness of their former functional capacity was almost as appalling a shock to their minds as the catastrophe itself...The handrails of polished mahogany and the brassbound vinyl-covered steps, instead of providing an easy rise to which they were accustomed, jutted out in an overhang above their heads. The ceiling of the companion-way which had paralleled the angle of descent now presented the only means of ascent, a slippery and precipitous slope of painted steel with lighting panels inset and flush, an unmanageable surface offering no grip or handhold of any kind...Most movies, be it action, horror, or disaster, make it very clear the order of death, and the rules of dying. The black guy usually dies first. The plucky, towheaded kid (and his dog) always survive. There are usually two heroes: the older one who must lay down his life; and the younger one, who will survive and learn a valuable lesson from the first, older, deader hero. This book throws out those rules. Characters are killed off with stunning brevity (and at times, with a macabre and lurid detail). A child is lost. There is a graphic rape. The death count rises the higher the group gets. Even after survival, the wounds keep opening. These are people who have lost loved ones; these are people who will never be better than they were in that ship, and you can sense that the rest of their lives will be anticlimax. The end is so bleak I have to call foul. It's so cynical that I didn't think it was fair to the characters. You can treat your creations roughly, but you shouldn't despise them (if a writer despises his characters, why should the reader get invested in them). It's not The English Patient, but The Poseidon Adventure is a brisk thriller fortified with ambition. And I'm thankful for Wolfgang Petersen's god-awful kick-in-the-balls-painful remake for bringing it back into print.
I'll admit it, I actually like both the movies based on this book! So when I saw a copy of it at a library book sale, I thought why not give it a try. That said it was one of the worst books I've ever made myself finish. It is completely dated in the way that the characters interact and especially the way that women and non-WASPs are treated. The premise of the book is interesting. A luxury cruise liner overturns and a group of survivors decide to work their way to the bottom of the ship (now the top) in the hopes of being rescued. Having seen the movies first I expected a lot more action. Nope! The author seemed to want to show how deep he was by making it a character piece. That meant that even in a moment where you should have had drama and action, you are mostly just reading the characters' thoughts. Maybe that would have been fine, if I had liked the characters. I found them to be so annoying! The men all seemed to think they should be macho and in control and got pissed off (either at others or themselves) when they weren't. The women were either portrayed as shrews or weak. Well, except for the old Jewish couple...but they were their own stereotype.Yep...I hated this book. Even the ending was twisted in such a way as to make it seem pointless. Maybe, I was expecting a big Hollywood adventure novel and that's why I was disappointed. But I think I would have disliked it even if I had never seen the movie.THERE IS A SPOILER IN THE NEXT PART, SO STOP IF YOU DON"T WANT TO KNOW...but I have to put in the part of this book that disturbed me the most.At one point in the story the characters are looking for someone who has wandered off and the teenage daughter, Susan, is searching by herself. She goes in to a room and is attacked and raped by a young member of the crew. I could understand putting this event in to show the nature of people in a crisis, even though I find it to be gratuitous, but they way the aftermath was handled is what pisses me off. After the rape has happened, the girl reaches for the lantern and I was certain she was going to hit him on the head with it and run away. Nope. She just wanted to see who it was. Of course he's only a young man who becomes distraught that he attacked a passenger (because it would have been fine to rape a crew member), so of course she has to COMFORT him!!! I get it I was raised in a different time period than this book was written, but really!!!! I think I was done with this book then! I just couldn't get past the way it was written. I hated how the author made it seem like we should feel sorry for the boy.
What do You think about The Poseidon Adventure (2006)?
I remember seeing bits of “The Poseidon Adventure” growing up, but I didn’t recall the entire story. I knew the basic premise that a ship capsizes (rolls over) at sea, and a group of passengers attempts to escape by working their way to the top/bottom of the ship. That upside down nature of the story was a little hard for me to visualize. I don’t do well with spatial elements, and even though the author described what the passengers encountered, it was still hard for me to get a clear picture of what was going on. The story shows its age and would not be considered politically correct by 21st century standards as it demotes homosexuals and several minorities. If you can get past those elements, it is an entertaining story of survival and resourcefulness.The author introduces a cast of imperfect characters, and flips between their viewpoints as we learn about their backgrounds, faults, and strengths. At times, it was a little jarring to bounce from one character to another because the author would spend so little time with any one character. I think the imperfect nature of each character made the story interesting, and of course seeing how they came together to tackle all the obstacles a sinking, capsized ship could throw at them.The book includes some violent scenes including rape, but does not go into graphical detail. Some of these scenes, made me question the author’s ability to write from the female perspective. I found the rape scene believable in the life and death scenario presented, but the lady’s reaction seemed a bit far-fetched to me. Another example would be the way the author attempted to write from the perspective of a frustrated housewife. While some elements seemed plausible, other seemed a bit contrived.Overall, this was an entertaining read that will leave you with a few unanswered questions about the passengers , their motivations, and what the future holds. I guess that allows readers the ability to somewhat craft their own ending.
—Kyle
For more reviews, please visit my blog Obsessive Compulsive Reader Obsessive Compulsive Reader Actual rating: 0.5/5 It was only recently when I visited the local library that I discovered the film "The Poseidon Adventure" was adapted from a 1969 novel of the same name written by Paul Gallico. Given that I was fairly disenchanted with some of the cliched scenarios in the film, I was intrigued to pick the novel up and see whether the usual "book is better than the movie adaptation" mantra holds true.Boy, did I regret my choice.The story began like any regular epic adventure style novel. Having seen the film before, I knew going into this novel that there are a lot of characters involved and that it may be initially very confusing to orientate myself. But The Poseidon Adventure doesn't even try to make the initiation process easier. Every character is introduced without any fanfare with only one or two characteristics attached to them, none of which are very distinguishing. I understand that the book is trying to set up the premise that the passengers are normal-day people but in the span of the first two chapters, you are introduced to a dozen characters and I kept referring back to the beginning to figure out which character is which.But that was not even the most unpleasant part of the reading experience. I don't think I have ever been so angry whilst reading a book before. Even with the concessions made to the book's age, there is nothing remotely enjoyable about the underhanded way he deals with the issues of race, class and gender. I don't care if those were the widely accepted behaviour back then. The background setting is one thing, the way the characters just roll over and accept what is dished out to them is a whole separate issue. I cannot wrap my head around how the characters behaved, reacted and did what they did, especially the completely unnecessary epilogue. What the?!This is probably one of the most unpleasant books I have read this year. For those who watched and enjoyed the film, stick to the movie. Obsessive Compulsive Reader
—Obsessive Compulsive
Sometimes we have to make allowances for older books and movies and TV shows, because it's not fair to judge them by contemporary values. Still, some parts of The Poseidon Adventure are hard to take.There's the cop's selfish, racist, shrewish wife, who sometimes "needs" a good slap. Not only in the opinion of her husband, but also in the opinion of the other survivors and even the narrator.There's the rape. Not that it happens, but the victim's reaction to it. Ye gads.There's the need for all of the men to tend to all of the women. At least one thing the book has in common with the movie is Belle's swimming prowess, with which she is able to help the group get past what seems to be a dead end. So the female characters aren't completely weak and useless -- just almost.A common refrain you will hear when a book has been adapted to the screen is: "the book was better." But there are many instances when a movie has made improvements on the original novel, and I think that's the case here. Of course, I suppose I'm biased, given that I saw -- and loved -- the film first. But without giving too much away here are a few examples of how the film improves on the book:- The overturning of the ship is a greater spectacle in the film because it occurs during a larger event. In the book, most of the passengers are in their cabins when the ship rolls.- In the film, deaths are more meaningful.- The book does not have the sense of urgency found in the movie. In the book, there's time for the entire group to nap and for two characters to have sex TWICE.- The ending of the film is positive.Some comments on the book's ending -- again, without giving too much away. One of the biggest differences between the book and the movie is the tone. The movie is about a heroic and epic struggle for survival. Whereas the book almost views the entire story as pointless. Mind you, I'm not saying that there's something wrong with the tone. Gallico has a different message than does the movie, and that's fine. But I do prefer the movie's message to the book's.After all is said and done, I enjoyed spending more time with these characters and following them through "new' adventures.
—Andy
