How you feel about the Netflix documentary Trainwreck: Poop Cruise will entirely depend on what type of cruiser you are.
Cruise apologists — meaning those who find themselves defending cruise lines no matter how egregious their actions — will either choose not to watch or do so through the most cynical of eyes.
But like other entries in the Trainwreck series (Woodstock ’99, The Cult of American Apparrel) the episode focusing on the infamous Carnival Triumph disaster manages to be both appropriately disturbing and surprisingly heartfelt.
The Facts Behind Trainwreck: Poop Cruise
If you know nothing about the Carnival Triumph incident, it seems safe to assume that you were either unable to read or living in quiet solitude during February of 2013.
Because as a newscaster points out during the opening moments of Trainwreck, the media — and, by extension, the world — quickly became obsessed with the story. It was nearly impossible to open a newspaper or turn on a television without seeing images of the ship which, following a fire in the engine room, wound up adrift at sea for five days without power.
Things aboard quickly deteriorated thanks to unusable toilets and an increasingly panicked population of passengers who found themselves in an increasingly unsafe and wildly unsanitary situation.
Eventually, numerous tugboats were called upon to help the stricken vessel reach the port of Mobile, Alabama.
Good Times Gone Bad
Poop Cruise features a wide swath of people, from the ship’s cruise director Jen Baxter to members of a bachelorette party whose party turned into a nightmare. The hour is an unflinching — and occasionally cringe-inducing — look at not only the rapidly-devolving situation aboard the ship but how the public relations nightmare was handled by the company itself.
At one point, a former member of the PR team says the quiet part aloud with regards to Carnival’s initial statement, which majorly underplayed how serious the situation on Triumph had become. “You give them what they need,” he says candidly, “and no more than that.”
But of course, there soon developed a media frenzy around the ship and her stranded passengers. Thanks to the incident having taken place in this modern age, there is plenty of actual footage courtesy of the ever-present cellphones.
What is perhaps most unexpected about Poop Cruise is that in retelling a rather grotesque tale, the documentarians have managed to imbue the hour with a surprising amount of humor, even if much of it is admittedly dark.
Timing-wise, the release — which hits Netflix on Tuesday, June 24th — is probably not ideal as far as Carnival is concerned.
They are, after all, currently dealing with the catastrophically bad roll out of their new Carnival Rewards loyalty program.
At the end of the day, however, the world’s most popular cruise line has survived far worse times than even this double-whammy of negativity will result in.
