You’ll Need a Bigger Boat: The 20 Best Movies Set on Water – Ranked! | film

20. Deep Rising (1998)

Stephen Sommers’ sci-fi horror film follows a group of scene-stealing actors playing mercenaries hired to destroy the Argonautica cruise ship for insurance purposes. But the giant mutant octopus got there first! Potential cephalopod fodder includes treating Williams, Kevin J. O’Connor, and Famke Janssen as a jewel thief.

19. The Legend of 1900 (1998)

A child abandoned on the transatlantic ship SS Virginian grows up to become a talented pianist (Tim Roth) who never gets off the boat. The highlight of Giuseppe Tornatore’s eccentric judgment is Ruth fighting a piano duel with Jelly Roll Morton, who is unfairly portrayed as an arrogant bastard.

18. Water World (1995)

Kevin Costner plays a samurai-like wanderer with webbed feet and an augmented trimaran in this big-budget sci-fi thriller, set in a future where melting polar ice caps are engulfing the planet. Everyone searches for the legendary Dry Lands while fending off Dennis Hopper and his gang of chain-smoking pirates.

17. Titanic (1997)

Two hours of back-and-forth between a posh girl (Kate Winslet) and a wandering yobo (Leonardo DiCaprio) are redeemed by James Cameron in a stunning re-enactment of one of the worst disasters of the 20th century. You have to admire the chutzpah of the director who managed to twist a death toll of 1,500 people into an emotional tale of liberation.

16. Ship of Fools (1965)

Peasants, flamenco dancers, and Nazi eugenicists gather on a passenger liner sailing from Mexico to Europe in 1933. Stanley Kramer’s epic features Vivien Leigh, in her final role, as a grieving divorcee, but it is Oscar Werner, as the ship’s doctor, and Simone Signoret, as the radical Countess, who provide the film with its emotional jolts.

15. The Last Journey (1960)

The USS Claredon is torn apart in an explosion, and Robert Stack’s wife (Dorothy Malone) is trapped in her cabin in this compelling portrait of the initial disaster. Can Stack and the heroic engineer (Woody Strode) save her before the ship sinks? Fun fact: The legendary French ship Ile de France plays the role of Claridon.

14. Death on the Nile (1978)

Bette Davis and Angela Lansbury are among the suspects in a murder aboard a Nile paddle steamer in this Agatha Christie-themed crime thriller. Peter Ustinov, as Hercule Poirot, fails to prevent half the crew from being stabbed or shot, reducing the number of suspects to a manageable number. The bags are more fun than the new 2022 edition.

Nicole Kidman and Sam Neill play a couple trying to cope with the shock of their son’s death by taking their yacht for a tour of the Pacific Ocean, where they rescue Billy Zane from a sinking sailboat. Big mistake! Phillip Noyce’s thriller is essentially a horror movie at sea, but it’s a very classy film that put Kidman on the map.

12. Maggie (1954)

An Englishman, transporting furniture for an American industrialist, is tricked into hiring a rickety Clyde the Puffer in Alexander McKendrick’s brutal Ealing comedy in the subversive imitation of his own whiskey bonanza! Naturally, the Scottish boat captain and his crew take the two landowners on a journey, quite literally.

11. Juggernaut (1974)

Richard Lester gives his dramatic disaster narrative a touch of State of the Nation in this unnerving tapestry of explosives planted aboard the luxury liner, the SS Britannic. Red wire or blue wire? Richard Harris and David Hemmings play bomb disposal experts. Roy Kinnear, as the ship’s entertainment director, provides a heartbreaking study in tragicomic despair.

10. The Poseidon Adventure (1972)

This adaptation of Paul Gallico’s novel is one of the pinnacles of the 1970s disaster genre. The SS Poseidon is capsized by a tsunami, and it’s up to Reverend Gene Hackman to lead his flock through the capsized hull to safety. Shelley Winters is memorable as a shopkeeper’s wife with a useful history in competitive swimming.

9. All is Lost (2013)

Robert Redford delivers a late-career masterclass in solo performance as a man struggling to survive in the Indian Ocean after his yacht, the Virginia Jane, is damaged in a collision with an errant shipping container. It’s stressful enough to watch, so goodness knows how physically exhausting it must have been for the 76-year-old star during filming.

8. Captain Phillips (2013)

Tom Hanks does a great job in one of his roles as an ordinary man under unbearable pressure, as the captain of an American cargo ship hijacked by Somali pirates off the Horn of Africa. Opposite him is Barkhad Abdi (“I’m the Captain Now”), making his thriller debut as the pirate boss in director Paul Greengrass’s thriller, based on true events. If the final scene doesn’t excite you, you’re not human.

7. The Triangle (2009)

Bad weather conditions capsize a yacht in Christopher Smith’s brilliant Anglo-Australian sci-fi thriller, leaving an exhausted single mother (Melissa George) and her fellow passengers stranded on an abandoned ship in the middle of the ocean. The timeline gets complicated, so Smith’s plot is meticulous, anchored by a great performance from George and capped by a devastating payoff.

6. As the Ship Sails (1983)

Federico Fellini’s late-career, artificial masterpiece takes place aboard the ship Gloria N, which sails from Naples toward a Mediterranean island where a group of opera singers plan to scatter the singer’s ashes. But the real world intrudes in the form of Serbian refugees. Freddie Jones, as a suave but bumbling journalist, is our guide to the shenanigans on board.

5. Apocalypse Now (1979)

“Never get out of the boat!” Wise words, though, as bad things happen on and off the US Navy’s river patrol ship Erebus as Captain Willard is transported upriver to Cambodia to end Colonel Kurtz’s rogue leadership “with extreme prejudice” during the Vietnam War. It’s a nightmarish journey into the heart of darkness, the title of Joseph Conrad’s 1899 anti-colonial novella that inspired the screenplay by Francis Ford Coppola and John Milius.

4. Lifeboat (1944)

Adapted from John Steinbeck’s novel, Alfred Hitchcock’s wartime survival drama is a case study in how to portray a group of characters in a confined setting and keep it exciting. The survivors stranded in a lifeboat after their ship is torpedoed include Tallulah Bankhead, as a journalist who offers her diamond bracelet as fish bait, and Walter Slezak as a sneaky German.

3. Jaws (1975)

The second half of Steven Spielberg’s blockbuster moves from dry land to a fishing boat, the Orca, where saltwater shark expert Quint (Robert Shaw) teams up with a sea-phobic police chief (Roy Scheider) and an obsessive ichthyologist (Richard Dreyfuss) to kill the great white carnivore terrorizing Amity Island. It might have been better to use a larger boat.

Russell Crowe and Paul Bettany play mismatched seafaring friends, Captain Jack Aubrey and nature-loving Dr. Stephen Maturin, in Peter Weir’s perfect merging of two Patrick O’Brien novels. It’s like immersing yourself in virtual reality in another time and place – on board HMS Surprise, off the coast of South America, during the Napoleonic Wars. Boom cannon, amputations, superstitions, sea shanties, and not a single duff note.

1. L’Atlante (1934)

A barge captain brings his new bride back to live on his canal boat in one of cinema’s finest visual lyrical journeys. While filming his only feature film, Jean Vigo was already suffering from tuberculosis, which led to his death at the age of twenty-nine. The film flopped, and only later became a staple on lists of the greatest films of all time. Michel Simon steals every scene as cat-loving crew member Bear Jules; The BFI has compiled a supercut called C’atalante.