In The American Enterprise Magazine, Eric Cox reviews Poseidon, this week's Hollywood remake of yet another decades-old film that should have remained underwater (not to mention yet another attempt to recreate Titanic's enormous success):

For those not old enough to realize it, the movie is a remake of The Poseidon Adventure (1972), one of a number of films in the first half of the 1970s that featured all-star casts trapped in disastrous situations. Other self-explanatory titles of the genre include Airport (1970), The Towering Inferno (1974), and Earthquake (1974).

It was probably no coincidence that the 1970s was also a very tumultuous time. The Vietnam War and Watergate were roiling American politics. The nascent environmental movement succeeded in banning the pesticide DDT in 1972—the same year that the killing of 11 Israeli athletes at the summer Olympics marked the birth of modern terrorism. High gas prices and the creeping economic and political influence of Arab countries were a source of great public anxiety. That fear was explicitly expressed in the satirical film Network (1976), in which a crazed network news anchorman named Howard Beale rants against the fact that an Arab oil company has just purchased his own television network and that the Arabs are taking over the country.

Disaster movies played to the public’s fears, and for a short time Hollywood capitalized.

No doubt Warner Brothers studios decided to remake The Poseidon Adventure because they own the copyright and enough time has now passed that they feel the movie can be recycled for a new, younger audience. But it just so happens that there are some striking similarities between the 1970s and the current decade that may herald a revival of the disaster movie genre.