I haven’t been reading much (too tired), but on the bright and fiery side, I finally watched Dante’s Peak. I like disaster movies, so why hadn’t I yet seen this film from 1997? I had a reason, and it was that it took me all these years to get over the disappointment that was Volcano, another disaster movie that came out the same year. After you’ve been “burned” that badly by a volcano movie, you become leery of volcano movies.
Roger Ebert, in his review of Dante’s Peak, said that the film “follows the disaster formula so faithfully that if you walk in while the movie is in progress, you can estimate how long the story has to run. That it is skillful is a tribute to the filmmakers.”
I agree with Ebert. The movie was entirely formulaic, but it hit all the notes on pitch. As I watched, I was concerned about the characters as they crossed an acidic lake in a sinking boat. I felt sorry for the guy about to be swept away by the obligatory flood, but also satisfied, because movie justice demanded his death (it was his fault that the town hadn’t evacuated in time). I was impressed that the “crossing the lava” scene included some flames. One of my pet peeves about movie lava is that the flammable things touching the lava don’t catch fire, because shouldn’t they? Sure, the scene was ridiculous, because crossing a lava flow in a truck isn’t remotely feasible, but at least the truck caught fire. Give me a realistic detail or two and I can let the rest of the nonsense pass, even the missing dog who suddenly reappeared and jumped into the truck mid-lava and survived unscathed even though the truck was on fire. In fact, that was one of the best scenes in the movie. A good disaster movie combines the ridiculous and the believable in just the right measure.
Now, if I could just go back in time to 1997, I would watch Dante’s Peak instead of Volcano and save myself 20+ years of movie grudge-holding.