No need to prep snacks for this watch, folks – Trainwreck: Poop Cruise, the latest in Netflix’s Trainwreck series about sensational viral stories, could be a punchline to the old joke that goes, “What’s grosser than gross?” Whether this saga about a 2013 Carnival cruise that lost all electrical and plumbing power in the middle of the Gulf Formerly Known As The Gulf of Mexico is grosser than when you open up the oven and your rump roast farts? That’s subjective. Less subjective is how this Netflix quasi-anthology of documentary films has gotten increasingly snarky as it’s progressed from more serious fodder (the Woodstock ’99 fiasco, the deaths at the Astroworld music fest) to wiseass reiterations of news stories that devoured social media feeds (Rob Ford’s bizarre occupation of Toronto’s mayoral office, this here saga of backed-up toilets). Now, to the point of whether the 55 minutes of Poop Cruise are worth watching: Well, it depends on whether or not you give a shit.
The Gist: And that is the absolute last poo pun you will read in this review. Rest assured, we’re done with that. One quick musing before we get to the nasty nitty-gritty of this doc: How has a documentary been made about the infamous Poop Cruise of 2013, but there hasn’t been one about the infamous Dave Matthews Tour Bus Chicago River Sewage Tank Dump of 2004? A lot of runners are being stranded on base here. So now, to the story at hand: FEB. 14, 2013, A DAY THAT WILL LIVE IN INFAMY. This is when CNN and other news orgs sent helicopters over the ocean so TV watchers worldwide could gawk at the 4,000 people who were stuck on the Carnival cruise ship Triumph, a moniker that drips with terrible, terrible irony. A low-key version of Lord of the Flies had been playing out on the Triumph for a couple of days by then, and, as former CNN anchor Brooke Baldwin says, “We couldn’t get enough. America couldn’t get enough.” Please insert commentary on how CNN shovels a lotta shit here.
The original plan for the Triumph was a four-day tour going from Galveston, Texas to Cozumel, Mexico and back. We meet some of the passengers and crew: A cheerful gent who was on board with his fiance and her father, who he didn’t know very well; cue the stereotypical in-law anxiety. A sweet dad who took his 12-year-old daughter on vacation after a rough divorce from her mother. A trio of White ladies on a bachelorette excursion. A chef, an officer, a chirpy British cruise director named Jen. Everyone was having a great time eating and drinking and dancing and swimming, or working to entertain passengers, until it became the worst time ever on the way back from Cozumel. It began with a 5:30 a.m. fire alarm. One of the ship’s engines caught fire. It was put out and after a couple hours everything seemed to be ready to proceed as normal – until the electricity went out, never to return again. The fire had irreparably damaged the power cables. The engines were kaput. The ship was adrift in the Gulf. It desperately needed a tugboat or four to get home.
Now, you know how you can still use your toilet in your house even when the power goes out? That wasn’t true for the Triumph. The septic system on board needed electricity to work. I’m not sure why; the documentary isn’t interested in that. What it is interested in is the gory details of how crew members asked passengers to whizz in the showers and duke in red plastic bags with biohazard logos in them, which wasn’t something anyone wanted to do so they dropped deuce in the toilets anyway, a sight the chef guy refers to as resembling “lasagna.” Take a moment here. Imagine the smell. Imagine the mass disgruntlement. Imagine a hot slice of lasagna from the best Italian restaurant in town and never ever wanting to eat it. Of course, without power there’s no ventilation system or air conditioning. The smell’s even worse now, isn’t it? Food was an issue; so was civility. People dragged their mattresses out on the deck to get away from the reek, building tent cities out of sheets; people fought over lettuce sandwiches; people couldn’t use their cell phones because there was no signal. Days passed slowly as the boat drifted aimlessly into the Gulf. When the tugboats finally arrived and began pulling the ship, it tilted to one side and all the peepee and doodoo sloshed everywhere. Toldja not to bother with the popcorn with this one.
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Poop Cruise is a distinctly goofy blend of the Covid-cruise documentaries (The Last Cruise and Hell of a Cruise) and Class Action Park.
Performance Worth Watching: Godspeed to Jen the cruise director, who had to make the shipwide announcement about depositing the brown in red baggies. “For the No. 2… that was definitely a tougher problem than a No. 1,” she explains.
Memorable Dialogue: Bachelorette No. 2: “I immediately started taking Imodium.”
Sex and Skin: Nothing besides what’s in the first sentence of “our take” below.
Our Take: Open letter to Poop Cruise director James Ross: Did you really have to stage a reenactment of a pantsless woman squatting over a shower drain? The doc is a mostly unserious account of the few miserable days aboard the Triumph, with plenty of commentary and photos detailing how utterly disgustipating it was. Admittedly, and especially because nobody suffered serious physical harm, it’s hard not to laugh at the comedy of misfortune and poor judgment that defines this saga. The “fun” might be dampened for those of us sensitive enough to consider the psychological damage incurred, though. And then we might laugh anyway upon learning that Carnival decided to lighten the heavy mood by giving away booze, which seems a bit shortsighted when you consider that such circumstances might further stress the ol’ plumbing, you know?
I’m at least partially convinced that this doc exists so we can watch a trio of bachelorette-party tequilamongers share their White Lady disgust in a comic fashion – although to be fair, they don’t come off as entitled or angry, just people who wanted to drink away their vacation. “I lost my dignity in Cozumel,” one of them admits, and this was before the calamity began. Another says the first thing she wanted to do once she got off the hellboat was get a margarita. Now, one assumes the first thing one might want to do is, you know, use a functional toilet, but hey, I’m all for diversity of opinion.
Anyway. There is a serious heart to this story, not that Poop Cruise is compelled to explore it near as much as it wants to recreate what it was like to slosh through raw sewage. I have some questions: Why are the toilets connected to the electrical system? What was the risk of people getting seriously ill in that environment? Why were there so many red biohazard bags on board in the first place? Don’t expect answers, though. There are a few things the doc could be “about,” primarily Carnival’s malfeasance, ranging from a history of similar fires on its ships to the fine print in the purchase agreement that doesn’t guarantee safety for its paying passengers. (The legality of everything is glossed over, secondary to the visage of a stereotypical weirdo of a maritime lawyer, interviewed with a glass of whisky and a cigar in hand.)
There’s a teensy subplot here about how CNN had a new boss who threw piles of resources into 24/7 coverage of the Poop Cruise, as a Carnival PR guy sighs deeply from the damage-control HQ. It paid off for CNN, which helped make the mess a huge international story. They certainly knew what the public wanted, for better or worse, and the overreactionary exploitationist sensationalism continues with Poop Cruise, a documentary that’s little more than pointing cameras at an overflowing toilet and asking people to comment on it.
Our Call: Sure, there’s some guilty-pleasure comedy to be derived from Poop Cruise, but it’s ultimately a pretty cynical endeavor. So I say SKIP IT, and not just because the phrase “STREAM IT” is another toilet-level pun.
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.