21/09/2025
The S.S. Poseidon, made famous by Paul Gallico’s 1969 novel The Poseidon Adventure and the 1972 film, was imagined as a grand but aging ocean liner overturned by disaster. In the book, she began life as the R.M.S. Atlantis, a transatlantic liner built in the 1930s, only to capsize in the Atlantic after an undersea quake. The film reimagined her sailing the Mediterranean, capsized by a giant wave on New Year’s Eve. Survivors had to climb up to what had become the bottom of the inverted vessel, a setting that gave the story both spectacle and claustrophobic tension.
Though fictional, Poseidon was directly modeled on the real R.M.S. Queen Mary, the iconic Cunard liner launched in 1936. The resemblance was intentional, since Queen Mary embodied the scale and style of 1930s passenger ships. Filmmakers relied on detailed miniatures filmed in studio water tanks to create convincing visuals of the ship at sea, long before CGI. The decision to use Queen Mary’s design gave Poseidon authenticity and recognizability, while also rooting the fictional disaster in the grandeur and decline of real-world liners from the golden era of ocean travel.
