The Reel Review
In February 2013, more than 4000 passengers and crew aboard Carnival’s Triumph cruise ship experienced the unthinkable while at sea in the Gulf of Mexico – an engine fire-caused power outage that rendered the ship’s air conditioning and electrically-powered toilets inoperable. This morbidly fascinating Netflix documentary relives the grim, days-long ordeal for those aboard the ship.
This hour-long installment of the Netflix Trainwreck documentary series is undoubtedly the grossest, as passenger smartphone footage captures the unfortunate perfect storm of events that occurred halfway through the cruise: from the engine fire and power outage, to food shortages, no air conditioning, and passengers left to defecate in red biohazard bags when toilets and backed-up showers started overflowing with urine and feces. The drama reaches a fever pitch when tugboats hauling the cruise ship to port jostle the Triumph, causing it to list, with raw sewage sloshing out of rooms and down ship corridors. It is revolting.
The storytelling itself is nothing special – interviews with doomed passengers and crew that range from unintentionally comical to the ridiculous, with former CNN anchor Brooke Baldwin and the ship’s normally unflappable cruise director Jen Baxter, who bears a remarkable likeness to satirical comedian Diane Morgan (Cunk on Earth), adding much needed perspective to the mayhem. What is perhaps most remarkable is not the uncomfortable disaster, but many of the passengers’ shocking levels of entitlement and an inability to adapt to challenging inconveniences. (They’ve clearly never gone camping.) While Trainwreck: Poop Cruise is a grim reminder of buyer beware when it comes to booking a cruise, it’s also a pretty damning indictment of the collective vapidness and stupidity of many of its American budget travelers.
REEL FACTS
• After a $115 million scrub down, Carnival Triumph, like a phoenix from the ashes, was rebranded Carnival Sunrise. With 29 owned ships and dozens of additional Carnival-branded ships, Carnival Corporation is the world’s busiest passenger cruise line, transporting about 14,000 passengers, or 41% of the market, a year.
• Cruise Director Jen Baxter left Carnival in 2022 and is currently a Program Director at Viking Cruise Line. In March 2023, Baxter was voted one of Carnival’s Top 10 Cruise Directors of all time.
• Ironically, Trainwreck: Poop Cruise debuted at #2 on the Netflix movie charts when it arrived on the streaming platform in June 2025.
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