Decade of Disaster: Part 1
Grab the biggest bucket of stale popcorn you can find & join me on a look back at the high highs (flying cow) & low lows (Aerosmith) of the 90s disaster movie revival.
As of this writing, and for no discernible reason, the 1970 airplane-in-peril movie Airport is available for your viewing pleasure on Netflix. Though it met with middling reviews (many of which sounded exactly like the complaints professional critics have about big noisy crowd-pleasing films today), Airport was a smash, nominated for multiple Academy Awards and even earning a Best Supporting Actress win for Helen Hayes. It not only resulted in three sequels1, but kicked off an entire decade of campy, soap operatic disaster films2, in which the actual disasters played a distant second to interminable personal drama between the characters.
Very nearly every potential disaster from towering infernos to avalanches to hurricanes were addressed at some point, to varying degrees of success. Among the highlights were Walter Matthau wearing a pimp hat and hanging out in a bar while Los Angeles crumbles around him in 1974’s Earthquake, and cynical pastor Gene Hackman furiously railing at God immediately before falling to his death in 1972’s The Poseidon Adventure. Nevertheless, with the success of Star Wars, adventure dramas began to focus more on intergalactic affairs, and disaster films fell out of favor by the end of the decade.
They came roaring back in the mid-90s, when Hollywood seemed to be printing money and we weren’t facing the imminent collapse of one studio after another. Though only lasting for a mere five years, it was a glorious run of over-the-top nonsense, with an MTV-era gloss the earlier films lacked. I now present a chronological breakdown of both the best and the worst of this brief time. noting that even the bad ones trigger a strange sort of nostalgia for 90s excess, and peak bombast. We’ll never get those days back whether we want them or not.
Outbreak (1995, dir. Wolfgang Petersen)
Disaster: highly contagious deadly disease
Body Count: Less than a dozen on-screen
Okay, so it’s a bit of a stretch to refer to Outbreak as a disaster movie since, really, disaster is averted at the last minute. But it fits the structure of a disaster movie, right down to the estranged couple who manage to work out their issues in the face of imminent death, and someone dismissed as an alarmist saving the day in the end. Plus I needed something to round this list up to an even ten.
ANYWAY, from the darkest corners of the African jungle comes the mysterious “Motaba virus3,” a disease similar to the flu, but much more contagious and with a significantly higher mortality rate. Crusading military virologist Dustin Hoffman is on the case, and soon discovers that rather than destroy the virus, Major General Donald Sutherland wants to pull an Ash from Alien and use the virus as a bioweapon. Considering that much of the climax of the film involves Hoffman and pilot Cuba Gooding Jr. on a helicopter trying to avoid being shot down, it becomes more of a Walking Dead-esque “humans are the real danger here” story, but up to that point it’s a fairly gripping drama, with the bonus of getting to see Kevin Spacey, his hair dyed Howdy Doody orange, die a horrible death.
Though Outbreak took some considerable dramatic license with how viruses and their treatments actually work (such as a cure showing immediate, near-miraculous results), its roots in real-life viral research made this (along with the best-selling The Hot Zone) the go-to nightmare fuel for germaphobes for over a decade. It would later look like a Disney movie compared to 2011’s Contagion, a film that portrayed how America would eventually react to a real global pandemic with such eerie accuracy that in another time Steven Soderbergh would have been branded a heretic and burned at the stake.
Twister (1996, dir. Jan de Bont)
Disaster: Tornadoes
Body Count: Only a few on-screen, probably dozens off-screen
After the smash success of Speed, Jan de Bont was given a blank check and all the sex workers and cocaine he wanted, and he put all of it into his follow-up Twister, a movie about a scrappy team of Oklahoma meteorologists who like to drive directly into tornadoes just for shits and giggles.
Introducing mainstream audiences to Philip Seymour Hoffman (and also finally casting Bill Paxton as an old-fashioned matinee hero), Twister manages to hit that disaster movie sweet spot between being dumb as a bag of hammers and yet also simultaneously being the greatest movie of all time. It helps that, as opposed to a lot of disaster movies, which line up character archetypes (the Incompetent Bureaucrat, the Blustering Jag-Off, the Cute Kid in Peril) to be knocked over like so many bowling pins, everybody in this is eminently likable, even Cary Elwes as a rival storm chaser, who all but twirls an invisible mustache in malevolent glee.
They all sell a deeply silly, largely humorless script (written by the largely humorless Michael Crichton) with charm, making it more fun than it should be. I’ve watched it a few times now, and I still don’t understand what exactly Bill Paxton is trying to do when he launches what looks like a flying trash can filled with ping-pong balls into the eye of a Category 5 tornado, but I buy that he knows what he’s doing, and that’s enough. I am endlessly torn between wanting to ride along with Paxton and his motley crew of lovable nerds, and quietly excusing myself in order to attend the nearest knitting circle with Jami Gertz, playing Paxton’s less storm-enthused fiancee.
Despite it being the second biggest hit of 1996, up until last year Twister had been the rare big budget/high returns standalone film. Now, with the stink of “please, god, something’s gotta work” desperation surrounding it before filming has barely begun, a sequel is in the works, inexplicably helmed by low-key family drama Minari director Lee Isaac Chung, and starring that fellow from Top Gun: Maverick who looks like he has too many teeth.
Independence Day (1996, dir. Roland Emmerich)
Disaster: Aliens!
Body Count: Nearly the entire planet
As opposed to Twister, which at least maintains the illusion of being a smart dumb movie, Independence Day revels in its stupidity. Unlike Outbreak and Twister, which focus largely on experts trying to prevent disaster, it’s an orgy of death and destruction, starting when a bunch of morons having a “welcome, aliens” party are fried on top of the Capitol Records building. These creatures aren’t interested in coming in peace, or plundering Earth’s resources, or even laying eggs in our chests, they just want to kill…kill…KILL, and it’s great. It might be the ultimate “that blowed up real good!” movie.
Sexy President Bill Pullman, rather than hiding in a well-appointed underground shelter until it all blows over like every real-life President would, dons flight gear and goes to fight the alien menace. Though initially it seems as though their technology is light years ahead of ours, as it turns out not only can their computer mainframes be hacked using ordinary Microsoft coding, but also they can be punched in the face and knocked out like a human. Do they even have faces? Who knows? It doesn’t matter!
If you think the 2016 sequel makes even a rudimentary attempt at being smarter, it brings back a character4 who, when last we saw him, was killed on-screen by an alien tentacle wrapped around his neck.
Daylight (1996, dir. Rob Cohen)
Disaster: Explosion followed by tunnel filling with water
Body Count: At least hundreds
Does anyone other than me even remember Daylight? While I think about Twister (or at least, Philip Seymour Hoffman in Twister) maybe once a week or so, Daylight only comes to mind every other month, when I go through the Lincoln Tunnel from New York City into New Jersey. Though it did reasonably well at the box office, it’s been largely omitted from the 90s disaster movie conversation (that only I have with myself). That’s a shame, because like Independence Day, the mass destruction sequence5 is pretty spectacular, as flaming cars are tossed around left and right like an angry toddler in the middle of a tantrum, and a guy yells “OH SH—-” just before taking a giant fireball directly to the face.
Unfortunately, after that it follows the beats of The Poseidon Adventure so closely you’d think screenwriter Leslie Bohem had the script for it open on his lap when he was writing his first draft. Like the earlier film, the survivors of the initial disaster are in imminent danger of drowning. There’s also a squabbling couple, a pompous jerk who insists he should be in charge and ends up getting himself and other people killed (played here by one Viggo Mortensen), a maudlin “leave me…save yourselves” scene, a wisecracking kid, and an elderly woman who dies quietly as proof that we are dealing with a cruel and unjust God. It even has, like Poseidon’s “The Morning After,” a sappy theme song, the Bruce Roberts and Donna Summer duet “Whenever There is Love.” The primary difference is that leading man Sylvester Stallone doesn’t die mere minutes before the remaining survivors are rescued, because at some point in his career Stallone decided, like the Rock today, that his characters are all basically Wolverine and can never die.
Dante’s Peak (1997, dir. Roger Donaldson)
Disaster: Volcano eruption
Body Count: Presumably hundreds, though only a couple on-screen
Hollywood got the hint that Americans loved watching other Americans get their shit jacked up either by aliens or horrific explosions, and answered that craving by releasing not one, but two volcano movies within three months of each other in 1997. The first, Dante’s Peak, was directed by Roger Donaldson, who was at the helm of some of the most mediocre movies of the 80s and 90s, including Cocktail, Species, and the juiceless remake of The Getaway. In trying to maintain the realism that its competitor Volcano would ignore entirely, Dante’s Peak plays it safe almost to the point of boring, focusing less on chaos and more on Pierce Brosnan running around looking at graphs and grimly measuring sulfur levels in the local water supply. A volcano killed his wife, you see, and like the shark in Jaws: the Return, he has a personal vendetta against them.
When things finally start cooking, it takes a jarring turn towards the unintentionally campy, as exhibited by the use of an honest to goodness Wilhelm Scream as a character is swept away in a bridge collapse. However, nothing tops the one scene everyone knows from Dante’s Peak, when crabby granny Elizabeth Hoffman sacrifices herself as acid water threatens to dissolve the boat taking her grandchildren to safety. She jumps into the water and pushes the boat the rest of the way, screaming the whole time as her legs are whittled down to two little smoking pencil stubs6, before collapsing on the shore and dying. That makes the first hour of actual dreary science (who need it anyway, not me) all worthwhile.
Come back for Part 2 on Thursday!
Though the original Airport attempted to address real-life air travel-related issues, like safety and environmental impacts, each subsequent sequel became increasingly more absurd, peaking in the final film in the franchise, The Concorde: Airport ‘79, in which George Kennedy shoots a flare gun out of an airplane window while it’s in the air.
Though it’s more closely inspired by the 1957 film Zero Hour, Airplane!, of course, lifts some of its best bits, including the gruff, no-nonsense tower supervisor and the sick little girl, directly from Airport.
Ebola without the copyright infringement.
This character is named Dr. Brackish Okun. You know, Brackish, like the filthy stagnant water that collects in gutters and birdbaths and attracts mosquitoes. Great, great name.
Said disaster is triggered by a high speed car chase, which, if you’ve ever been through the Lincoln Tunnel, you’ll understand is laughably implausible.
“Graphically” and “gruesomely,” Wikipedia helpfully points out.