A Life Through Film #051: Volcano
Or: A Comparative Analysis of the Two Volcano Disaster Movies That Came Out in 1997
Release Date: 4/25/1997
Weeks at Number One: 1
Thanks for reading! This is my ongoing series where I track the evolution of American culture in my life by reviewing every number one film at the weekend box office since I was born in chronological order. If you haven’t already, I highly recommend reading my introduction post here, and be sure to like and share the review if you enjoyed it!
For almost five decades of the 20th century, almost everyone on Earth lived under the constant fear of nuclear annihilation. Then, one day, they didn’t.
The collapse of the Soviet Union put an end to the Cold War, a non-conflict defined and kept at bay by mutually assured destruction should one superpower decide it was time to start launching nukes. This was all before my time, but hearing people who lived through this period talk about it is harrowing, often because of how mundane the threat of nuclear holocaust became to them. Children were expected to duck and cover under school desks in case of mushroom cloud sighting, while fallout shelters became the final survival hopes for many a suburbanite.
If you were born in the ‘50s or ‘60s, you may have spent the most formative years of your life assuming that, at some point, society would be buried under the weight of so many ICBMs. What happens, then, when that worry almost entirely evaporates in the End of History 1990s?
The decade, as it turns out, ended up being the perfect era for disaster movies.
During the Cold War, the kind of destruction seen in ‘90s disaster flicks would have been too evocative of the imagery of thermonuclear annihilation. Future decades, darkened by events like 9/11 and the controversial knowledge that we’ve permanently altered the Earth’s climate for the worse, made the genre a lot less fun as a result. The 1990s, unburdened by these threats and already host to increasing industry reliance on computer graphics, found a trend that the major studios could comfortably structure whole summers around.
The ‘90s disaster movie trend has two notable subgenres. In the first, the threat of mass destruction comes at the hand of science, human or otherwise. Jurassic Park [4/5] is an early kind of version of this, though the more prototypical example is Independence Day. These can be greatly exciting but unfortunately require original ideas with potentially long explanations, something most Hollywood producers don’t have time for.
The second type of disaster epic is much more appealing then, since oftentimes all that needs to be done creatively is plugging a chapter from a middle school science textbook into a blockbuster narrative template.
We’re about to see natural disaster movies litter the landscape for the next few years, thanks to the incredible commercial success of Twister in 1996. The blustery hit kindly provided a solid blueprint for its imitators to follow: an ensemble cast faces overwhelming danger from an awe-inspiring force of nature while basic interpersonal conflict plays out in the narrative scenes between elaborate effects shots.
About a year on from Twister, we’re finally starting to see the imitators to its success. Studios were so eager to cash in on the craze that a couple of them didn’t even care to make something all that original. Thus, two massive blockbusters about surviving volcanic eruptions released within weeks of one another. Only one of them topped the box office, but it’s probably not the one you’ve heard of.
Volcano may be the worst title for a movie I’ve yet covered in this column, but its simplicity forces honesty. This is indeed a film about a volcano. There’s other stuff in there too, but an eruption of lava and the chaos it causes is at the magma-filled core of the movie. The filmmakers were clearly going for the striking clarity of Twister, but there’s no cool colloquialism for this type of disaster. You just have to call it what it is. A volcano.
The specific circumstances of this particular cinematic volcano are a bit interesting at least. Volcano starts with a brief day-in-the-life opening credits montage of life in Los Angeles across the professional and socioeconomic spectrum. Pretty quickly though, a massive earthquake cracks a hole in the fault lines beneath the city, allowing magma to burst through the La Brea Tarpits and threatening the lives of everyone in its slow flowing path. It’s up to Mike Roark (Tommy Lee Jones), director of the Office of Emergency Management, Amy Barnes (Anne Heche), a geologist and seismologist, and a loosely connected ensemble of supporting characters to minimize the damage and save as many Angelinos as possible.
In this way, the movie’s titular volcano almost resembles something closer to Godzilla or the aliens in Independence Day. One day everything’s fine, the next, a disaster so unlikely it may as well be science fiction. This is in sharp contrast to the other volcano movie of 1997, released about two and a half months before Volcano.
If you’re familiar with any big budget volcano movie from the late ‘90s, it’s probably Dante’s Peak. This perilous picture, starring Pierce Brosnan as a sexy volcanologist and Linda Hamilton as a smoldering small town mayor, leans closer to the Twister template by making its central disaster the teensiest, tiniest bit more plausible than the competition.
Dante’s Peak, Washington sits at the base of the seemingly-dormant volcano that gives the town its name. Small disturbances to the local landscape sound alarm bells for Dr. Harry Dalton (Brosnan), who finds a simmering romance with Mayor Rachel Wando (Hamilton) even as his concerns are ignored by the town’s government. Sure enough, Dante’s Peak soon erupts, sending our characters through a gauntlet of geological dangers as they try to flee to safety.
Don’t worry, I won’t be doing a point by point comparison for each of these movies. Volcano is the one that topped the box office, and fair’s fair, it gets the review. But it is pretty funny how two similar movies released so close together, right?
Most people have noticed the dual release of twin films over the years. These are movies with similar concepts by different studios released within the same year as one another. Creative bankruptcy fueling the most direct kind of competition you’ll see in Hollywood.
Growing up in the 2000s, I encoded a few egregious examples like Mirror Mirror/Snow White and the Huntsman, Ratatouille [4/5]/Flushed Away, and No Strings Attached/Friends With Benefits. But it’s hardly a new phenomenon. Bob Mondello at NPR documented decades of examples of studios biting each other's ideas going back to the 1930s, and the late ‘90s certainly weren’t exempt from this phenomenon. But how do twin movies happen?
It’s hardly accidental. As Mondello puts it in that NPR piece, “Hollywood is not a big town. Everyone knows what everyone else is doing, and movies that cost millions of dollars require many people and many months of development.”
If, say, Paramount hears that Tristar has greenlit a concept that is both winning enough that it seems like a potential hit but also broad enough that no one studio can lay claim to the idea, there’s nothing stopping them from at least commissioning a script.
This won’t be the last time we cover studios offloading the creative processes to the R&D departments of a rival, but it is one of the more ambiguous ones. It’s been tough to determine which volcanic project actually came first, though I have suspicions. My rule of thumb for determining which twin is the original and which is the replicant is the release date. The movie more eager to be in front of audiences first in an effort to seem more original is, more often than not, the derivative project. It’s also usually the lesser of the two, a movie rushed into filming and through post-production in order to get the jump on its counterpart.
According to a report from Spokane, Washington’s The Spokesman-Review, on-location shooting for Dante’s Peak wrapped up on August 4th, 1996, two months after it started. Meanwhile, the IMDB page for Volcano lists its shooting dates as falling between July and October of that same year, slightly overlapping with the competition. That’s honestly too close to accurately call, but I lean towards Dante’s Peak being the copycat project. It ended up being the far more expensive production; was that all in service of rushing to beat Volcano to the punch?
I also think this tracks when you look at the two movies conceptually. Dante’s Peak is basically just a highly dramatized depiction of the very real Mount St. Helen’s eruption in 1980, even down to its Pacific Northwest setting. Meanwhile, Volcano is ever just a bit more conceptual. See, not only does the movie utilize a more fantastical concept, but it also tried to have a real message, man.
Before I clown on Volcano for wanting to end racism, it’s important to remember some context. Los Angeles was only a few years removed from the scary chaos of the Rodney King Riots, and the racial tension that had led to them hadn’t subsided in the subsequent years. As the city continued to develop, gentrification of historically Black and Latino neighborhoods like South Central and Boyle Heights kept the issue of racial inequality topical, even as the city tried to forget its dark past.
Screenwriter Billy Ray wanted to capture the racial and socioeconomic tension around him in LA using an exciting story that would force its characters to confront those issues in a way that eventually resolved harmoniously. The suddenly erupting magma became a symbol of societal stress coming to the forefront, making our characters realize that, at the end of the day, we’re all made equal by nature’s chaos.
Ray, a newbie at the time who has since built up a heck of a career, does regret this idealistic notion:
“I think that [Volcano] script comes from the most pretentious parts of me.”
As we’ll see, the eventual execution of this message leaves a lot to be desired, but it’s something. Even a badly implemented original idea is still an original idea. What does Dante’s Peak have? Newspaper clippings from 15 years prior and a worn copy of a middle grade geology picture book?
I think the studio suits knew that they needed Dante’s Peak to come out before Volcano to seem original through lack of comparison. Rather than hope for it, they made it happen. During the summer of ‘96, Universal, distributor of Dante’s Peak, began running ads promoting a March 7th, 1997 release date for their movie. 20th Century Fox, not wanting their Volcano to be seen as the ripoff, announced that they would be releasing their movie a week earlier, on February 28th.
Fox had unknowingly activated Universal’s trap card. In the fall, the latter studio announced a new, even earlier release date of February 7th for Dante’s Peak, putting its rival in a hell of a predicament.
Volcano would potentially look like a ripoff if it came out after Dante’s Peak, but they just couldn’t compete with that release date. Green screen scenes were still being filmed, and Fox couldn’t compete against their own Star Wars re-releases. The studio had to acquiesce, and went on to delay the Volcano release by two months in order to create some separation between it and the competition.
Universal was the one who turned this whole thing into a fight, which furthers my theory that they’re the ones ripping off 20th Century Fox. Dante’s Peak director Roger Donaldson straight up seemed to be taking all of this quite personally, telling the Los Angeles Times in 1996:
“I don’t want to put all this effort into a movie and see it written off because we don’t come out first.”
As a result of these Hollywood games, the star-studded Dante’s Peak released first and grossed enough at the box office to become the more definitive 1997 volcano movie.1 But because it was competing against a Star Wars re-release that was doing unexpected gangbusters, it never topped the charts. Instead, Volcano, released months later against poorer competition, was the eruption-based disaster movie that gets its own entry on my Substack. Suck it, Universal!
So after all that, is Volcano actually any good? I mean, it’s neither a smash redefinition of disaster movies nor an entertaining cinematic failure. Perhaps most unfortunately, it’s just alright.
Director Mick Jackson was the perfect pick for Volcano, given his career track record. The British filmmaker was the man behind Threads, a legendary TV movie that is often lauded as one of the most terrifyingly realistic depictions of nuclear war that’s ever been put to screen.
So that’s the disaster component covered; what about Hollywood? Wouldn’t you know it, Jackson also thought LA was just the worst! His 1991 satire L.A. Story is a spoof of the whole city and its social climber citizens. No man has ever been more qualified to make a movie about the city of angels being destroyed in a massive inferno, and he does a solid job shepherding us through the Volcano thrillride.
You have to meet these kinds of stupid blockbusters where they are. I’m not engaging with Volcano like I would, say, Spotlight [4.5/5]. One of those movies is trying to be a lot more fun and over the top than the other, let me tell you. But that doesn’t mean you can’t have standards for Hollywood effects fests like this. Volcano was released less than a year after Twister and Independence Day, the standard bearers for this ‘90s disaster wave and two movies I happen to quite enjoy (especially ID4). When you put this week’s movie against its forebears, you can’t help but notice that it belongs in a lighter weight class.
The most important thing in these movies are the effects and how convincingly they convey the perils the characters face at the hand of an uncaring Earth. Volcano is pretty good at this. The film uses a tasteful balance of practical effects and CG that complement one another pretty well.
The volcano’s destructive potential mostly manifests as a dangerous lava flow, capable of melting most anything that stands in its way, organic or otherwise. Most of the time, the computer effects conveying this magma are decent enough by 1997 standards, especially in wide shots. The crew built a massive, 90% scale replica of Wilshire Avenue in LA for the bulk of its second act action, lending a sense of scale and tangibility to the scenes set there. When the practical destruction of that set coalesces with the slow but steady flow of the intensely hot liquid rock, it leads to a genuinely intense setting.
The effects aren’t perfectly smooth, though. There are a few CG elements during the initial eruption of the titular volcano that look noticeably off compared to most other scenes. Later, some of the compositing of character shots and post-production effects in the climax is so bad, it renders what should be a moment of ultimate drama unintentionally goofy. Still, I’d call most of the special effects in Volcano solid for the time, especially the in-camera ones. The scene on the melting subway car effectively conveys the heat and danger of the situation to this day.
Ray’s script for Volcano is filled with nearly as many positives as it is negatives. The core concept of plopping its titular formation right in the middle of LA is compelling, but it’s never fully capitalized on. Apropos of literally none of its other storytelling choices, Volcano opts for realism in how there’s not actually a mountainous volcano suddenly atop the La Brea Tar Pits. Instead, it’s just a visually unsatisfying oozing sore on the Earth, not Vesuvius (or Dante’s Peak, for that matter) overlooking the target of its destruction like a vengeful deity.
This central location also unsatisfyingly protects many of the most iconic Los Angeles landmarks. At no point are the Hollywood Sign, Walk of Fame, Rodeo Drive, Santa Monica Pier, or even the Capitol Records Building under direct threat from the lava flow. We lose the Tar Pits and LACMA, both of which are interesting from a historical and cultural perspective, but hardly register when people name the most representative landmarks in Los Angeles County. Why limit the movie’s visuals like this? You’re telling me multiple volcanos couldn’t have popped up around town, turning Beverly Hills into a new Pompeii or pouring lava directly through the big “O’s” in the Hollywood sign?
The actual narrative that Ray and co-writer Jerome Armstrong spin is mostly okay. Tommy Lee Jones learns to balance his professional passions and his family life while flirting uncomfortably with a much younger woman in Anne Heche. That’s about as far as the movie goes in terms of character arcs, but the archetypes that the ensemble manages to embody are a fun catalogue of blockbuster tropes. There’s the shy but brilliant scientist, the brash but good hearted cop2, the cocky and cantankerous but ultimately selfless public works employee3, they’re all here.
The quality of acting is fine, just fine. No one really jumps out as an obvious highlight, unlike Brosnan in Dante’s Peak. The general strength and competency of the ensemble means that I walked away generally neutral on the performances overall. Tommy Lee Jones in particular fails to inspire as a dynamic action hero when the movie needs him to be, working better as an authoritative voice in a crisis.
His character does have a few moments of his confident façade shattering, and it’s in these small instances that Jones does his best work in the movie. That feeling of being totally overwhelmed by how much needs to be done with so little understanding of how to do it, it’s so real. Unfortunately, there’s just not enough time to linger, we have to see someone else get melted by lava.
The narrative of Volcano jumps between different groups and locations, each dealing with different facets of the disaster in different ways and only occasionally overlapping. I liked this storytelling overall, but it did make it pretty obvious which plot lines were most important based on how much screen time they got. It’s not really an ensemble piece if most of the screen time is dedicated to the civil engineering problem solving of Tommy Lee Jones and his crew of surrounding characters.
This is where the focused disaster of Volcano brings things to a crawl narratively. In Dante’s Peak, there was a smaller group of characters facing far more threats as a result of the volcanic eruption: lava, hyper acidic water, mudslides, ash in the air, pyroclastic flow, and more. Its rival, however, has more characters dealing with fewer volcano-related threats, meaning you get basically every exploration ever of how moving lava can be a problem. While neat at first, this central threat loses steam by the third act when they decide that the new threat should be lava that flows even faster than before.
Of course, the deadly volcano is hardly the only threat to Los Angeles that the movie is concerned with.
Over time, the most maligned part of Volcano’s narrative has become its attempt at social commentary. Honestly, I don’t think that the film gets off to a bad start in this regard. The beginning of the movie, before any earthquakes or eruptions, wastes no time bringing attention to a larger class divide within LA, catalyzed by the building of a new subway line that becomes important later in the film. Believe it or not, Volcano does a good job employing subtlety in this scene by organizing the extras in these groups not solely by race, but with a sure implication that the city’s class divide has both racial and socioeconomic factors at play.
Later, when the volcano first erupts, we see a historically Black neighborhood suffering from widespread fires but without any fire trucks in sight; we know they’re all blocks away trying to save am art museum instead.
This is hardly groundbreaking commentary on the nature of red lining or the racist history of metropolitan planning, but it’s more than you’d think given that this is a movie called Volcano that’s about a volcano. Big budget disaster or action movies at this time weren’t usually trying to interrogate serious social issues; even Independence Day fails to call attention to any touchy racial dynamics among its wide, diverse cast of characters. “There is rising social tension along economic and racial boundaries within LA as a result of systemic inequality that extends to both city management and emergency services” holds water as a foundational theme both within and outside the context of the movie.
Volcano messes this decent thematic foundation up via one supremely tone deaf subplot. About halfway through the movie, one of the residents of the Black neighborhood that’s burning to the ground runs to the base of operations on Wilshire Boulevard and begs for assistance before immediately being arrested by a nearby police officer for “harassing a firefighter.” This man remains in handcuffs for a large chunk of the movie, even as other cops lightly chastise his arresting officer before letting him continue to abuse his police privileges. The man is later freed to help move some equipment and then just…leaves the movie on the back of a firetruck.
What are we supposed to feel with this narrative? Anger at the arresting officer? Sympathy for the man who threatens to become “the volcano version of Rodney King”? Frustration at the fact that he’s only allowed to go free because he provided free labor to the officers who threatened him in the first place?
Actually, as the climax of the movie assures us, it’s supposed to be wonder at the ability of human beings to unite in the face of tragedy and disaster. The final scene of Volcano features Keith David holding a small lost child and asking him to point out who in the crowd around them is his mother. But oh! The child looks around and realizes that everyone is covered with ash and dust from a building collapse!4
“They all look the same!”
From the mouths of babes come Volcano’s greatly reductive idea on human cooperation. People tend to work together in the face of tragedy, but that doesn’t erase long-held systemic issues of discrimination and prejudice. This was true in 1997 and has only become even more obvious in the years since. Hell, you don’t even have to wait a decade for real life evidence to the contrary; Hurricane Katrina exposed just how little local and federal systems were prepared to deliver helpful emergency care to many non-white residents of New Orleans.
Unfortunately this message is the main crux that Volcano hangs its narrative hat upon. There’s nothing else within the overarching plot of the script worth sinking your teeth into, beyond a cursory idea of people in Los Angeles being a bit shallow and image-obsessed at times. I don’t hate that message inherently (Bojack Horseman is one of my favorite shows of all time, after all), but there’s just no room to do it justice when Volcano is trying to connect an ensemble story with thoughts on social justice as well.
That’s not to say there aren’t fun little writing choices here. There’s no traditional narration on top of the events of Volcano, but the movie smartly uses news audio to contextualize events and scene transitions in a way that feels cohesive to the setting. And there are even a few good jokes as well, such as a surprisingly erudite double entendre bit about a Hieronymus Bosch work being heavy.
Still, Volcano pales in comparison to the best of its disaster movie brethren. Less exciting than Independence Day, worse acted than Twister, not even as dynamic as Dante’s Peak. Scattered fun moments push this into a light recommendation, but maybe as a Sunday hangover watch and not a dedicated movie night pick.
The milquetoast 49% that Volcano holds on Rotten Tomatoes belies the vitriol that some critics held for it. Marc Savlov of The Austin Chronicle called the movie “an embarrassment,” calling out the movie’s bad writing and predicting a future for it as a so-bad-it’s-good staple. Sadly, the movie’s just too mediocre for that. Meanwhile, Kenneth Turan at The Los Angeles Times was more positive when he called the movie “tastier than usual” for the genre, which I personally disagree with.
Roger Ebert spends much of his Volcano review comparing it directly to Dante’s Peak, citing the other picture as having better special effects, writing, and acting overall. Truthfully, I think comparisons between the two films come out to be a wash. Dante’s Peak generally looks better and has more exciting setpieces, but Volcano features a stronger ensemble and has a more fun basic concept. I end up feeling about the same towards both volcano pictures: pretty fun, nothing I’m rushing to see again.
Volcano released to weak competition, meaning it easily took first prize during its debut weekend with a $14 million box office gross. But after a strong couple of months dominated by the Star Wars re-releases and Liar Liar, people were putting a pause on going to the theater. Volcano was briefly king of a down cinematic market that wouldn’t perk up again until Memorial Day. In the long term, there just wasn’t much room for it.
The theatrical run for Volcano ended after only 15 weeks due to disappointing box office returns. Week after week saw its gross dissolve into smaller and smaller receipts. By the time it left theaters in early August, the $100 million movie had only taken in $47 million at the domestic box office, though a strong international release did end up pushing it to a worldwide gross of $120 million. Volcano ended up recouping its cost on home video, but this disaster flick ended its time in American theaters as a financial catastrophe.
For the record, Dante’s Peak didn’t do much better. It did have a bigger opening, but $18 million was hardly enough to defeat the multigenerational love for Star Wars it was competing against. The first volcano movie of the year was hardly a blip on the box office radar by the time its competition was released two months later, and it left theaters in early June with a worldwide gross of $178 million. That sounds like a lot, but Dante’s Peak was an expensive production, estimated to be around $120 million. When you factor in marketing, it was a proper bomb.
I don’t think the dual commercial failures of Dante’s Peak and Volcano indicated that people were getting sick and tired of disaster movies. The trend was barely a year old, after all. As this column will show, plenty of people still needed to see cool effects that helped them process the anxieties of the upcoming Y2k. But you never want to judge a movement by its first imitators. They’re inherently rushed to meet a trend, leading to lower quality overall. It requires some patience, but the cream of the crop always rises to the top.
There will be plenty more natural disasters and star studded ensembles ready to face them in this column, many of which are far more memorable than Volcano.
Rating: 3/5
Next Week: As this week’s movie rides a trend, so does next week’s film throw it back to simpler era of thrills and excitement. Kurt Russell runs around the desert looking for his wife in the underrated Breakdown.
See you then!
-Will
Only played by one of my supporting actor GOATs, Keith David!
Another one my supporting GOATs, John Carrol Lynch!
Something else that hasn’t aged well. In a post-9/11 world, we know what will truly unite these people is an unfortunate future of devastating health effects