The disaster-movie version of this is called Twister. Re-watching this for the billionth time, I realised that it has a very different structure to other natural disaster epics. Normally, the whole point it to prevent a catastrophe, or overcome one that's already happened. Not with Twister. We get some property damage, cows, and a handful of fatalities... and that's it. Sure, the tornadoes cause a spot of bother, but not really anything you could call a disaster.
Don't get me wrong : cheesy disaster flicks are not a guilty pleasure for me, they're just a pleasure. Actually, movies of all sorts from the 1980's-90's are my particular favourite. Are they the best ? No, but they're my favourite. The world back then had a naive silliness to it that movie makers weren't afraid to exaggerate - especially in the movie-in-a-movie world of Last Action Hero, which shows this perfectly. Movies in this era perfected the art of pure entertainment. Believability ? Realism ? They can go hang. Instead they aimed at popcorn-consuming fun, and they got it.
Twister is as entertaining as anything else from this golden age. But instead of stopping an asteroid or killing terrorists, the goal for the protagonists is... collecting data. That's it. Once they've got their data, they survive a tornado and all go home. Oh, sure, the data is useful in some abstract, off-screen future for developing meteorological models, but the in-movie extent of the narrative is collecting data and absolutely nothing else.
What if other movies followed this formula ? Here are a few thoughts.
- Deep Impact : a daring crew venture onto a deadly comet and take some really accurate readings of its orbital trajectory so they can find out just how screwed the planet is. Then they go home, and everybody dies.
- Volcano : a great big volcano erupts in Los Angeles, but Tommy Lee Jones is on hand to get some high-precision readings of how hot the lava is. He's invited to give a prestigious guest lecture in a geology conference. Meanwhile, the city is destroyed.
- Independence Day : a huge alien fleet descends towards Earth, but plucky astronomers are able to work out whether they're carbon or silicon-based. Then they wipe out the world.
- Armaggeddon : a drilling crew sent to an asteroid work out ways to stop asteroids in general, but unfortunately not this particular one so everyone dies.
- The Day After Tomorrow : brave meteorologists make astonishingly accurate graphs of how cold it's getting. Everyone is very impressed and then dies.
- The Core : an elite team of geologists are sent to the centre of the planet, where they take some amazing readings of the magnetic field and then go home to die horribly.
- Jurassic Park : a bunch of dinosaurs go on the rampage and eat a load of people, but paleontologists are able to settle several long-running academic disputes shortly before being eaten themselves.
All things considered, realistic disaster movies are probably a terrible idea.
The Core. Man, you made me remember it. I will never forgive you.
ReplyDeleteCough cough WATERWORLD ! cough cough....
DeleteWhat about a version of "2012" in which, within the first five minutes, they rememebr that neutrinos don't interact with anything much, definitely not enough to overheat the earth's core, and that even if they could it would be odd for them to only start doing so now, and not during the billions of years of earlier history during which exactly the same nuclear reactions inside the sun have been producing them.
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