Volcano: A Fúria

Almost certainly not scientifically accurate (!!!!), "Volcano" is nonetheless a fantastic example of a mid-90's disaster movie, right down to Tommy Lee Jones' Mike Roark being one of those outsiders who predicts coming disaster quite accurately. But he never says "I told you so!", he just gets on and saves the world.

TLJ (who is equally as good at playing heroes as he is villains, if you ask me) is well supported by Anne Heche and Don Cheadle, amongst others.

Of course, the special effects are what we watch these movies for, and they don't disappoint - there are some really spectacular visuals. Seeing Los Angeles as the epicentre of a volcano is pretty cool. (Side note: Hollywood has really given that city a battering over the years!)

Uncomplicated, entertaining stuff - fun!

I'm not going to pretend that this movie is realistic. It isn't. But if you want to just sit down and watch a film with action, drama and entertaining characters, then this is the film for you.

Most disaster films are unrealistic, have no science behind them and if you think about them too much just get worse and worse. This movie is no exception. However, it is still a brilliant film if you want to sit down and not think too hard, or if you want to put a movie on without having to give it your full concentration. Personally, I think this film is great. There are better films out there, including better disaster films, but there are so many films that are ten times worse yet get better reviews. That's probably because they have better actors or are more realistic - but the job of a movie is to entertain, and this film does that brilliantly.

A blockbuster with a colossal budget of $90 million according to IMDb, but everything rhymes with cheapness: the dialog, the script, the plot twists, the soundtrack, ... It looks like a tv movie we may watch during a rainy Saturday afternoon, with a bad cold.

In the mid-90s, the disaster movie experienced a revival thanks to the advancement of CGI technology, which made creating scenes of destruction on a massive scale far easier and more convincing than ever before; 1997 was the year of the volcano, seeing both the release of Universal's Dante's Peak, and this rather unimaginatively titled effort from 20th Century Fox, which starred Tommy Lee Jones as Office of Emergency Management director Mike Roark, who must try and prevent downtown LA from being entirely engulfed by lava that erupts from the La Brea tar pits.

A slick, major studio, big-budget summer blockbuster, Volcano naturally benefits from a solid cast and state of the art special effects, but proves less thrilling than the premise suggests thanks to a lack of genuinely exciting or particularly innovative set-pieces: too much of the action centres around Jones's attempts to stem the flow of lava, which travels at walking pace thereby presenting little danger to anyone but the elderly and the infirm; meanwhile, director Mick Jackson ticks off the expected clichés from his disaster movie checklist—personal dramas, heroic sacrifices, a sexy scientist, even a cute dog in peril—before wrapping matters up rather too neatly with a finale that delivers far too low a death toll to be truly satisfying.

As a Big Budget movie, I'm sure that "Volcano" took more than a few months to make. Too bad someone associated with the movie didn't take that time to wander into the local library (the children's section, perhaps), and check out a book on "Volcanoes". I've seen Saturday-morning cartoons that have a better understanding of lava.

Instead we get many scenes of outright stupidity that would challenge even the densest of viewers. In one scene, Tommy Lee Jones and an assistant are standing near a volcanic vent, and their protective suits start to melt (of course skin is stronger than a protective suit, so they escape unharmed). But in numerous later scenes, people walk by lava like you might walk past a lake. Maybe this is because no one seems to know it's lava. I lost count of how many times a character said something like "What is that stuff?" or "There's something really hot and glowing coming down the street, and things are melting into it. Wonder what it could be?"

In what has to be one of the worst scenes ever filmed, two characters load an injured man onto the outstretched ladder of a hook & ladder truck. Then they hang onto a dangling fire hose as the ladder is lifted above the lava. The heat is so intense that the fire hose SPONTANEOUSLY COMBUSTS, but our characters are unhurt (their boots smoke a little). I didn't know that fire hoses were so flammable...

But "Volcano"is not just a dumb disaster flick with bad science. No! It's also a Socially-Important Commentary on our Society Movie! Throughout the film there are numerous "social messages". These are so corny and contrived that they could only have been written by people who have never actually experienced them. A racist cop tries to arrest a guy for assault (in the middle of a disaster scene!), but then the two team up to help save the day. Aww. Later, a little kid notes that "everybody looks the same" when covered by ash and soot. Aww. America's racial troubles could be ended, if only a giant volcano threatened us all.

More? Oh sure, there's more! Tommy Lee Jones is the too-hard-working dad who comes to value his daughter. Said daughter is a selfish brat who learns some responsibility, and respect for her dad. There's a guy whose only role in the movie is to say obviously insulting things. This makes him the "bad guy". One can see the writers of this movie hammering his role out: "We need someone who's rich and yuppie-like and snooty. Someone like us, only not as enlightened. Someone who wouldn't make a Socially-Important Commentary on our Society Movie like we are!" Of course, bad things happen to him and all is right with the world.

In the end, the mysterious, glowing, sometimes-hot substance we come to know as "lava" is channeled into the sea, and all of LA lives happily ever after in a just and fair world. A world, of course, with a big smoking volcano plopped down into the middle of it. Certainly that won't affect the real estate values?

The lessons of this movie are quite clear. 1) lava is harmless if you don't touch it; 2) small children will inevitably wander into incredible harm (but emerge OK), and 3) only through the trauma of sudden volcanic activity will we come to appreciate the true Brotherhood of Man.

Whoever thought up this movie should be thrown into a volcano...