Headscratchers / Poseidon

• Those were some freakishly powerful engines driving those bow thrusters. Word of God says that the scene was filmed with fans creating 100 mph winds from the turning of those props!
  • Forget about the power of the engines for a minute, how long would an engine that big ever run upside down before the oil dripped out of the cylinders causing the engine to seize up, not to mention that the propeller is designed to move WATER, not air, so it shouldn't really be creating that much of a draft in the first place, regardless of how fast it's spinning.
  • They're electric motors, so oiling isn't a factor; they can turn upside down just as well as right side up. That being said, though, High torque =/= high speed, necessarily - an engine like that almost certainly would have a gearbox and governor to prevent it from overspeeding, no matter how little resistance its prop encounters.
  • Yes, the propeller itself is driven by a motor, but the electricity for that motor is powered by an engine about the size of a school bus.
• At least one character is shown carrying a bottle of water. This suggests that such bottles are attainable on this ship, as they are just about everywhere in the world, but at the very least we know they have one. Now, what happens to a bottle of water when you empty it? it becomes a bottle of air. I don't know about most people, but if I needed to keep swimming through tunnels and whatnot, the first thing on my mind would be "containers of oxygen, for the love of God, containers of oxygen". So why doesn't this thought seem to occur to any of the characters in this movie?
  • Okay, you have a bottle of oxygen. What the hell are you going to do with it? Swim along the tunnel, open the bottle, and breathe from it? Tape a pipe from the bottle neck and put it in your mouth? A bottle of air is pretty useless unless you know how to Macgyver it into a useful breathing apparatus, which I imagine no one had the knowledge, time, skill, or calm in the face of panic to do so.
    • Plus, even if they managed to stick the neck of the bottle into their mouths and properly breathed through it under water...In time, they would be breathing in CARBON DIOXIDE!!! Y'know, the thing the lungs politely asks to leave every time you exhale?
    • It's not like they're on a three-hour tour of the flooded hallways-they end up only having to go as far as they can hold their breaths, and having something to breathe into would extend their range and possibly help them find safer routes. The "burning lungs" feeling when you hold your breath isn't from lack of oxygen, it's from the bit of extra carbon dioxide. The body actually can't detect how much oxygen it contains, only carbon dioxide, so it screams at you to exhale while there's still plenty of usable oxygen in your lungs. It's theoretically possible to sustain an adult on one breath for one hour if they breathe pure oxygen, but they'd still be able to hold their breath for only about 4-5 minutes because the carbon dioxide buildup would override their will and cause them to involuntarily start breathing again. A bottle of air could be useful in delaying or preventing that reaction and extending how far you can swim. And who needs MacGyver? Hold the bottle in your mouth, secured with one hand like you used to do at the swimming pool.
  • Next time you're at the pool why don't you fill a bottle with air and then go under and try to breathe with it? Please have a buddy with you for this experiment.
    • No need to go to the pool, just fill a bathtub and stick your head underwater, you'll find that as long as you have the right water bottle, one of those half liter bottles with the thin plastic that crinkles easily, you can easily suck in about a quarter liter's worth of air per bottle. Problem being that while a normal resting breath takes only half a liter of air, the kind of breath you'll be needing, in which you blow out and resupply your full reserve capacity, requires several liters of air (depending on your size) so to get one full breath you'd have to drag a whole case of empty, capped half-liter bottles behind you and somehow suck them all down while continuing to swim (or you lose so much time refueling as to make the exercise pointless). Presumably this is useful only for the kid you're dragging with you, who has a lower reserve capacity and therefore requires less to refuel (but presumably also can't go as far on a breath as the adults). On that subject, if the adults were near their limits on those swims, how did the kid not drown?
• Did no one else on the ship survive? No one else managed to get off the ship? No one else was alive in all the compartments they went through? With that many people, it's kind of hard to believe.
  • It was a sudden, shocking incident, and the water was pouring in soon after.
    • If that's the case, then there's a distinct lack of dead bodies around. They couldn't have possibly had everyone on that ship in the ballroom - and on a cruise when it feels like everyone's at an event, they're not.
  • It's possible some people were swept off the exterior of the ship when it capsized and managed to get into a raft afterwards, and were picked up along with the others after the helicopters arrived. But for everyone still alive but trapped inside the ship, their odds were next to nothing.
    • the original novel of the poseidon adventure confirms there where survivors who where on deck when the ship capsized who where swept off the decks and later clung to floating pieces of debris or broken lifeboats.
• If they were all such great swimmers, why didn't they just find their way to a stateroom and break the window, then swim to the surface? They probably would have spent less time under water, total.
  • Perhaps they didn't think the windows were breakable. Keep in mind that the captain (who remained in the ballroom) clearly did not think that was going to happen, even though he turned out to be wrong. Also, as you can see from the ballroom scene, the water would have come rushing in very rapidly, flooding the room, probably drowning them before they had a chance to get out.
  • Okay, they decide to break a window open. How are they going to climb through with a large amount of ocean water pouring in?
  • The big problem with breaking a window is the sheer force of the water rushing in afterwards. Even if you close and lock the door, the force of the entire ocean forcing it's way in is going to break it down and continue to flood the corridor outside, stairwells, shafts, etc. If it was a steel, watertight door, they could possibly pull it off, but the problem is then holding their breath long enough to swim up to the surface (assuming they weren't crushed from the force of the incoming water).
• While this is a bit of speculation, I always had this question... What would have happened if the wave had hit the ship from the back or the front instead of slamming into the side? I'm no expert, but I'd presume that in this case, the ship would have suffered a lot less damage and wouldn't have turned over.
  • That's exactly why the captain ordered the ship to turn into the wave, even though it was too little, too late.

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