The year is 1997. I’m fourteen years old and I’m about to watch Volcano, a disaster movie in which the titular rupture forms in Los Angeles like a geographic zit. I’ve been dying to see it ever since I saw it advertised on E!’s Coming Attractions, which is where ancient people used to watch movie trailers. The previous summer had seen a monumental leap in special FX technology with the likes of Independence Day, Twister, and Mission: Impossible. This summer, moviegoers expect nothing short of awe. What they get instead is some of the worst CGI in history: Air Force One, Spawn, and yes, Volcano.
The first notable offense in Volcano comes early on: Tommy Lee Jones squints at Anne Heche and asks, “Magma? What’s that?” I couldn’t believe my ears: Magma! Did this moron just ask what magma is? I get that he’s supposed to be a salt-of-the-earth type (That’s a stretch for Tommy Lee Jones, huh?), but come on. How can you root for a character this stupid?
Shortly thereafter, the head of the transportation authority, who previously ignored warnings to shut down underground transit, sacrificially redeems himself by leaping into lava so that he can throw an unconscious subway worker to safety. The moment his shoes make contact with the lava, he sinks like a rock in water. In reality, lava is as thick as the sap that oozes out of this idiotic picture. I have managed to block all other memories of this film (other than a Rodney King joke at the end, which I’m sure has aged well) thanks in part to South Park’s classic spoof. Volcano was, by far, the worst movie I’ve ever seen in theaters.
In an oft seen example of films twinning, the trailer for Dante’s Peak was shown before Volcano. Disaster movies often come in twos; I distinctively remember the trailer for Chain Reaction, in which Keanu Reeves outruns a city-flattening explosion on a Moped, being tacked onto the beginning of Independence Day, a film in which many characters outrun several city-flattening explosions in a variety of vehicles. Don’t ask me how I remember this thirty years later, ask why screenwriters think explosions are so slow. I digress.
Having been burned by Volcano, pun intended, I didn’t bother watching Dante’s Peak until it showed up on Starz some time later. I’m grateful because it’s only a slightly better movie. Pierce Brosnan plays Scientist Guy who tests the acidity of the water leaking into his family’s boat by touching it with his bare fingers—in case the fact the water was smoking wasn’t enough of a warning. In yet another contrived show of sacrificial heroism, Grandma hops out of a boat and tugs it through the lake of acid after it renders their oars and motor useless.
Why are disaster movies and gooey melodrama inexplicably intertwined? Consider the ol’ “You’re too low! Pull up!” cliche in Independence Day. Then there’s the fact aliens can exterminate billions of humans, buildings, and vehicles at the push of a button, but a dog can leap into a maintenance closet and emerge without so much as a singed hair (people cheered in the theater I was at). Disaster movies insist on huge ensemble casts, but the universe must be awfully small if the same guy who drags an unconscious alien into Area 51 to meet the curiously apolitical president is married to the stripper who coincidentally saved the First Lady’s life halfway across the country.
I remember an introduction to the paperback edition of Speaker for the Dead in which Orson Scott Card laments the fact that so many stories don’t focus on families. Disaster movies, by contrast, are all about family. And guess what: families are boring in popcorn flicks. When you pay money to see the San Andreas Fault ripping apart like Velcro, the last thing you give a shit about is The Rock repairing his relationship with his wife and daughter. Huge casts are fine in movies that have the bandwidth to deal with such dynamics, but when you spread your cast so thin and force them to run away from crumbling infrastructure, they have too little time to grow. If there are too many characters to care about, you care about none of them.
Consider Armageddon, which concocts a romance between Ben Affleck and Liv Tyler, then pits Bruce Willis against them because “macho man wants better for his girl.” This B-plot has potential, sure, but when it’s fighting for screen-time with the sheer epicness of an end-of-the-world A-plot, both get watered down. The cinematic twin to Armageddon is Deep Impact which, among its myriad cast members and apocalyptic excitement, begs us to care about a blossoming romance between teenagers who have no bearing on the story’s conclusion. Incidentally, Téa Leoni’s performance in this turd is the biggest disaster of all… imagine announcing to the world that the end is coming with no expression whatsoever.
I’m sorry, is the end of the fucking world not dramatic enough? Must they keep cramming unearned feel-good moments into the pictures where famous landmarks go boom? How many times can we stomach seeing a lead character search for their offspring in the aftermath of Extremely Bad Thing? How many heroic sacrifices until we’ve finally had enough?
There’s potential for organic drama in a movie about characters facing the end of all humanity. Some films have touched upon this to varying degrees, but I wouldn’t necessarily call them disaster films. Melancholia is an honest examination of depression at the literal end of the world, both pre-existing and inflicted. Wisely, it focuses on a manageable group of characters and how they’re affected by the film’s crisis—not boring pedestrian drama. Though you might not like its characters very much, you do care about them… funny how that works in good writing. Unfortunately, if you’re looking for action, you’re not going to get it from this one, and it’s about as fun to rewatch as toe surgery.
Then you have Threads and The Day After (not to be confused with the especially idiotic The Day After Tomorrow), twin made-for-TV movies about mutually assured destruction by way of thermonuclear war. Both feature ensemble casts, proving that even this disaster trope can be manageable, but both films largely focus on the problem at hand instead of inconsequential relationship dynamics. In The Day After, the moment John Lithgow looks at the sky and sees American ICBMs on their way to Russia, he correctly surmises it means one of two things: the Russians will launch a counter-attack or this is the counter-attack. The moment is chilling, but again: not much action to be found in either of these films.
As for viral disaster flicks, 1995’s Outbreak is another movie I regret seeing in theaters (Siskel gave it a thumbs-up, which is exactly when I realized my tastes tend to align more with Ebert’s). The only fun I got out of that piece of shit was my prankster mother coughing out loud to freak the other moviegoers out. On the flip side, Contagion is a movie that does scratch that itch I have for good drama in disaster movies. One: it’s a stroke of genius to kill off a star like Gywneth Paltrow in the opening act so you know this is serious business; two: I think Matt Damon’s understated reaction to learning she died is perhaps one of the boldest acting decisions he’s ever made. His wife’s death isn’t tangential to the plot. It’s happening because of the plot.
The O.G. disaster flicks—Airport, Earthquake, The Towering Inferno, and The Poseidon Adventure— illustrate the biggest problem with the genre: the formula hasn’t changed in fifty years. The only thing that ever changes is the disaster itself and even that’s up for repeats. And when was the last time you saw an original disaster? Ron Howard’s once-planned film adaptation of Neal Stephenson’s Seveneves could have been a shot in the arm, but I see two problems with that ambitious production: the novel is too big to faithfully adapt and, frankly, it’s too smart for financiers to take a chance on. I personally don’t think American audiences are too stupid to understand complex disasters (unless you’re talking about the real-life disaster of climate change), but Hollywood execs disagree.
Why else would they have their characters explain fucking magma to us?
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