Decade of Disaster, Part 2
The movies get bigger, dumber & louder as we close out the 90s with both the best & the worst of this all-too-brief but glorious revival
As I write this, The Flash, the movie that was supposed to both return some credibility to DC, and make the many bad decisions Warner Bros. has made in the past year all worthwhile, is flopping at the box office. It could be worse, though: Pixar’s Elemental met with its lowest opening ever. The upcoming Jennifer Lawrence comedy No Hard Feelings, despite it responding to a call for more adult comedies, is projected to earn a dismal $12 million upon its opening weekend. It’s not just any one studio that’s struggling, it’s the entire filmmaking industry overall, where genuine hits like Avatar: The Way of Water and Everything Everywhere All at Once are now the outliers.
The issue isn’t reserved to just audience exhaustion with the same tired plots reheated and served up with only a slightly different flavor, but indifferent studio heads who treat films as “content” to be churned out and immediately forgotten until it’s time for tax season. It’s alarming, depressing, and it makes one long for the golden era of the mid to late 90s, when there was something for everyone, and nearly everything made at least a respectable amount of money. Pick a random date, let’s say May 17th, 1996, and you’ll see that the top 5 movies were a disaster film (the previously discussed Twister), a family film (Flipper), a horror movie (The Craft), a romantic comedy (The Truth About Cats and Dogs), and whatever the hell Heaven’s Prisoners was1. October 5th, 1998 ‘s top 5 movies included Saving Private Ryan and How Stella Got Her Groove Back one right after the other. The number one movie the weekend of February 26th, 1999 was the sleazy thriller 8MM2. It was chaos. It was beautiful.
So we must cherish that time, celebrate it, both the good and the bad. With that, I bring you the second half of my look back at the disaster movie resurgence. We’ve reached peak saturation, the budgets are getting bigger and the egos are getting more out of control. One of the featured movies would break all-time box office records, while another would be considered a disaster of a different kind. Let us proceed, shall we?
Volcano (1997, dir. Mick Jackson)
Disaster: Uh, volcano
Body Count: Likely hundreds, a few on-screen
Though Dante’s Peak was both released first, and made more money, of the two volcano-related movies released in 1997, Volcano is the one that’s most remembered today. That may be simply because its title is easier to remember, but it was more charmingly silly. While Dante’s Peak, at least during its first half, purported to be a well-researched serious drama about the fearsome side of nature (at least until Grandma jumps into that acid lake), Volcano does everything bigger and dumber, not content to destroy a little town in Washington State when it can level the entire city of Los Angeles instead.
A volcano opens up in the La Brea Tar Pits, covering everything in great, rolling gobs of nacho cheese, and it’s up to emergency management chief Tommy Lee Jones, grimacing like he’s never grimaced before, to save the day. With the help of spunky seismologist Anne Heche (R.I.P.), he runs around barking a lot of orders, trying to stop the lava flow, and dumping water on it like he’s putting out a McDonald’s grease fire. When that doesn’t work, he simply blows up an entire 22-story condominium3, diverting the flow into the ocean. That’s American ingenuity, baby.
Though it ends on such a high, triumphant note you expect the remaining characters to get together and dance to Kool & the Gang’s “Celebration4,” no other movie on this list takes as much sadistic pleasure in depicting the cost of humans going up against Mother Nature. A seismologist is sucked into oblivion by a blast of hot pressured gas. Two firefighters are burned alive in their overturned truck. Then there’s poor Stan (John Carroll Lynch), who, like the grumpy granny in Dante’s Peak, sacrifices himself to save others, this time by walking through a pool of lava and then melting into it like it’s the end of Terminator 2.
And if the thought of that makes you queasy, try the meant-to-be-heartwarming scene where a cute kid looks at everyone covered in volcanic ash and sagely remarks “They all look the same.” That’s right, the volcano ends racism.
Titanic (1997, dir. James Cameron)
Disaster: Iceberg right ahead!
Body Count: 1,517 (per Wikipedia)
You might be reading this and thinking “But Gena, Titanic isn’t a disaster movie!” Well, first of all, this is my newsletter, if I want to say The Remains of the Day is a disaster movie I can. Second, while yes, it’s an old-fashioned romance and a historical drama, at its core it’s a disaster movie. It’s the best kind of disaster movie, the kind that’s about how God laughs in the face of man’s hubris5, just like The Towering Inferno. All the benchmarks are there: the stalwart hero, his leading lady, the noble sacrifice, the antagonist6, the symphony of destruction. It’s at least as much Earthquake as it is Gone With the Wind.
This is not to minimize Titanic. Quite the opposite: James Cameron’s ability to perfectly balance drama and disaster (though he clearly enjoys the disaster part more, but who wouldn’t) makes this a unique film in the genre. Many disaster movies try for emotionally stirring moments (hence the ubiquitous heroic sacrifice), but they often feel forced and cheap. But Cameron takes his time both developing the characters and illustrating the breathtaking splendor of the ship. You understand why everyone on it never even considered for a second that it could withstand anything that got in its way, even a 100-foot tall chunk of solid ice. It’s nearly halfway through the movie before that iceberg says “hey what up,” making cruel fate all the more devastating7. Titanic is a disaster movie, but it’s the greatest disaster movie of all time.
Even its theme song, while inescapable for nearly two full years8, is still far and away more listenable than the garbaggio written for Twister (Van Halen’s “Humans Being,” when they were still in their earnest phase) and Daylight (the instantly forgotten duet “Whenever There is Love,” and why does a movie about a collapsed commuter tunnel need a theme song anyway?). Because we can never know peace about such things, it would eventually be replaced by its dark, equally inescapable twin. Like a giant iceberg floating in black water on a moonless night, we just haven’t seen it coming yet.
Godzilla (1998, dir. Roland Emmerich)
Disaster: Kaiju
Body Count: A couple hundred, maybe, almost nobody who actually has a name
Speaking of theme songs, remember “Come With Me,” the Diddy-Jimmy Page duet from Godzilla? Sure you do, it ate it raw with a side of slaw, and yet somehow it barely makes it onto the list of the worst things about Godzilla. Topping that list is its utter indifference. Though you’d expect disaster flick directors to straighten their ties and step up their games after the unprecedented success of Titanic (particularly since it was still in theaters even by the spring of 1998), the stink of “who gives a shit” permeates every frame of what was initially one of the most hyped of movies of the year.
When director Roland Emmerich wasn’t working out his petty little grievances by naming a pair of incompetent bureaucrats “Mayor Ebert” and “Gene,” he was making a series of decisions that suggested he was filming it as a contractual obligation, with no intention of turning in something watchable. Some decisions hinted at uncertainty over the film’s special effects, such as shooting nearly everything at night and in pouring rain, and Godzilla constantly hiding behind buildings like a wallflower at a makeout party.
Others were inexplicable, like casting Matthew Broderick, who looks more Irish than a platter of corned beef, as a character named “Niko Tatopoulos,” or leading lady Maria Pitillo9 and comic relief Hank Azaria playing characters so relentlessly irritating that you beg for them to end up squashed under Godzilla’s foot like a wad of gum. Still others illustrated Emmerich’s contempt for his audience, such as Godzilla changing sizes according to where he is at any given time, or Broderick using a home pregnancy test to determine that Godzilla is pregnant, even though a home pregnancy test detects levels of the HCG hormone, and the H stands for “human10.”
As the saying goes, however, if you can’t dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit, and the bullshit here is near-constant explosions from rocket launchers, tanks, and military aircraft, and a scene involving a bunch of baby Godzillas that looks like the Asylum version of Jurassic Park. Because that’s what Emmerich wanted to make. He had no interest in a Godzilla movie, nobody cared about Godzilla anymore, dinosaurs were the new hotness, and if he could make one with half the intelligence and a hundred times the destruction, it would be an even bigger hit. As it was, the only prominent film writer to give it a positive review was Ain’t It Cool News founder and professional sex pest Harry Knowles, and even he had to be bribed.
Deep Impact (1998, dir. Mimi Leder)
Disaster: Comet
Body Count: Millions
“Gena,” you might be saying. “A lot of these movies sound too fun. I want to watch one that’s less fun.” If that’s the case, then let me introduce you to Mimi Leder’s Deep Impact, a movie that, like Titanic, wants to both overwhelm with spectacle and aggressively yank at the ol’ heartstrings, but does it with less finesse. It’s not a bad movie, but perhaps one with some level of self-importance that feels unearned, and forces its audience, who are there mostly just to see a big popcorn flick, to ponder some depressing questions, like “What would you do if you and your loved ones surviving a mass extinction event came down to winning a lottery for placement in an underground bunker11?”
It doesn’t help that, for all its lofty philosophical goals and desire to be seen as something more than a typical disaster movie, Deep Impact still heavily relies on the disaster movie playbook. For the fourth time in two years, much of the destruction is centered directly on New York City, and even pre-9/11 that became tiresome very quickly. Like in Independence Day, there’s a stirring “we must come together in our darkest hour” speech by a competent, paternal President (here played by Morgan Freeman). There’s the noble sacrifice (several of them, in fact), and many scenes of people who purportedly know things barking orders at underlings. The “this is a very serious movie” sheen does little to reduce the Mad Libs script.
If you don’t appreciate how serious Deep Impact is, the tearful goodbyes between characters are amped up to a level that makes Titanic look like Mary Poppins. Even though the entire Eastern Seaboard is wiped out, the movie attempts to end with a message of hope and rebuilding, but by that point the audience is so emotionally drained that all we can do is a single weak, exhausted “USA” fist pump.
Armageddon (1998, dir. Michael Bay)
Disaster: An asteroid “the size of Texas”
Body Count: Millions, but only a few that matter
Well, here we are, at the end of the brief but mostly successful return of disaster movies, and it concludes with one from the man who, for better and worse, redefined the big dumb action flick. I wish I had the same fondness for Armageddon that other people have, but, I must confess, immediately after it was over I turned to my then-husband and said “This is the worst fucking movie I’ve ever seen.”
Mind you, I had already seen Godzilla by that point. Though time has softened me a bit (not to mention that Michael Bay has gone on to do movies both far better, and far worse), upon first watch Armageddon, even more so than Independence Day, is so pleased with its own stupidity that it quickly becomes insufferable. Not a bit of the “science” that goes into the plan to destroy an asteroid that’s set to destroy the entire planet in 18 days makes sense. There’s not even an attempt, and it feels like asking “But wait, how would that work?” would result in someone shoving you into a locker and saying “Who wants to know, nerd?” The choice to assign a ragtag group of oil drillers to blow up the asteroid, rather than actual trained astronauts, seems to have been made largely due to a perception that astronauts are boring, and incapable of wisecracking and squabbling that makes up most of the oil drillers’ dialogue (written, astonishingly, by nine people).
Star Bruce Willis knows this is horseshit. That’s why he can’t stop smirking through most of it, until he gets his own corny noble sacrifice speech at the end. Not even the presence of Peter Stormare and Steve Buscemi (whose character develops something called “space dementia,” presumably inspired by an episode of Ren & Stimpy) makes it go down any easier, and certainly not the frenetic seizure-inducing editing, which ensures that no shot is held for more than 1.7 seconds. But hey, there’s a funny joke where a guy will get something stuck in his butt by a malevolently smiling nurse, so the migraine is worth it.
The cherry on the top of this shit sundae is the theme song hinted at in the Titanic section, Aerosmith’s “I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing.” After more than two decades of singing about drugs, sex on elevators, and dudes who look like ladies, and filming a series of videos that could be summed up as “the Jailbait Trilogy,” suddenly one of America’s biggest party bands wanted to get earnest. We know this because the song has the audacity to open with sweeping orchestral strings, and Steven Tyler rasping “I would stay awake just to watch you sleeping,” even though everything we know about Steven Tyler (from Steven Tyler himself) suggests that if he’s staying awake, it because he’s waiting to sneak off with a groupie waiting in a hotel lobby.
There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s part of Steven Tyler’s sleazy charm. It just makes him an ill fit for trying to do something heartfelt, though considering how much the rest of Armageddon is absolute over-the-top nonsense, maybe he’s a perfect fit, and I’ve been too hard on it this whole time. Much to think about.
A quick skim of the IMDB shows that it was a thriller starring Alec Baldwin and Kelly Lynch, and I will take their word for it.
Saving Private Ryan was still hanging in there too, an astonishing seven months after it was released.
It’s okay, though, because the builder of said condominium doubles as the Blustering Jag-Off these movies always require for some reason (see: Viggo Mortensen in Daylight, Billy Zane in Titanic).
It’s particularly odd considering it’s mentioned several times that three catastrophic eruptions are likely to take place, yet only two are shown, meaning that further disaster is still ahead.
Because life is a funny thing, the very day I write this it was announced that five wealthy “adventurers,” who paid $250,000 each to take an expedition to view the real Titanic’s remains, were killed when their homemade submersible imploded during its descent. To quote a wise woman I know: the ocean. Not even once.
In this case, Cameron zags on the audience by not killing off his antagonist with a well-timed chunk of metal to the dome or whatever (though in voiceover Kate Winslet does mention that he later committed suicide, so I guess that counts).
Of course, emotions are also heightened because the movie depicts a real-life event with mostly real-life people, even that old couple on the—oh god, I’m sorry, give me a moment.
Also briefly a popular wedding song, even though it is clearly about someone who has died.
Godzilla basically killed Pitillo’s blossoming acting career, which would be sad if not for the fact that (a) she’s terrible, and (b) given the one (1) interview she did about her experience later, evidently she didn’t think she needed to make much of an effort either.
There’s also the fact that cold-blooded creatures lay eggs, but that’s just being pedantic, the rubes in the audience won’t care.
Of course, the real-life answer to that is “Wait to die while billionaires and their families buy their way into the bunker,” which is even more depressing.