VOLCANO
A film review by Ben Hoffman
Copyright 1997 Ben Hoffman
>From the opening moment, when the titles appear on the screen, the eerie sounds of a building about to collapse, of columns and steel supports beginning to crack, envelope the theater. This sound special effect sets the films tone and stays with us all through the film. Good thing, too, because the story is the usual nothing as in almost all films about disasters.
Los Angeles, with its wonderful weather and laid back life style, is often the envy of the rest of the country. Those who envy us and who are turned on when they read of forest fires in our mountains, followed by rain and floods, and who may get a vicarious thrill reading about our latest earthquake, should delight in this new disaster Hollywood has imagined, a volcano whose lava (as hot as 2000 degrees Centigrade) instantly melts even steel buildings that it envelops. Welcome to L.A.
Los Angeles has a world-famous site, located next to our County Museum of Art. It is the La Brea Tar Pits. (A misnomer, since ""brea" means "tar." in Spanish.) At the tar pits, one can see a small lake (or large pool) of oil and tar that still bubble to the surface. Many prehistoric parts of mastodons have been unearthed In the film this is where the volcano erupts, sending hot lava geysers into the air, and shooting "lava bombs" weighing as much as two tons into the air to descend on a building or neighborhood instantly destroying it.
Los Angeles has an Emergency Dept headed by Mike Roark (Tommy Lee Jones). When all hell breaks loose with the volcano threatening to destroy much of Los Angeles, it is Mike's job to minimize the destruction and to save as many lives as possible. They could not have picked a better person than Mike. He is cool under stress, knowledgeable, daring and dependable. He is ably assisted in this new unprecedented disaster which no one had anticipated by Lt. Ed Fox, (Keith David), the Fire Chief.
Mike has a teenaged daughter, Kelly (Gaby Hoffmann) . He also has as a good friend and more, Dr. Amy Barnes (Anne Heche), a seismologist, who also helps in planning what to do about the disaster. Emmit Reese (Don Cheadle) is Roark's assistant.who mans the control center while Roark is out in the field battling the lava flow. Some 50 local media people play themselves.
The Special Effects are outstanding: the fires, the lava bombs, the boiling lava flowing down the city streets. The story (such as it is) includes Roark's daughter, Kelly, being in a building that is about to be blown up to block the path of the lava so that it will detour toward the ocean. Having seen enough movies to know that Kelly will escape unharmed, I was nevertheless wishing she would hurry up and get out of the building before it descended on her.
Happily, the film shows that when people are faced with something horrendous, a common enemy, they bond together, forgetting nonsense such as race, religion, and ethnicity. This is brought out nicely when a little boy has lost his mother. When asked to look at a crowd and see if he can point her out, he says "I can't. Everyone looks alike." And indeed they do, tired, covered with soot and ash.
Disaster films seem to be the vogue at the moment. As Screenwriter Jerome D Armstrong tells it, ten, twenty years ago, disaster films were about mechanical failures such as in The Poseidon Adventure, The Towering Inferno, and Westworld. Here we are dealing with a natural disaster for which we are unprepared and must learn to deal with it quickly.
My personal problem was that I was sitting in a theater about 5 - 10 minutes from where the film's disasters were being portrayed and so I could not get really caught up. Out-of-Towners should not have that same experience. It will get their blood flowing.
Directed by Mike Jackson.
Screenplay by Jerome Armstrong and Billy Ray from a story by Armstrong.
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Ben Hoffman
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