Friday 3 June 2011

That's because he deals with man's inclination towards sin, in defiance of God's will.

Volcano (1997)
Chosen by the whims of the ITV scheduler (I had planned on catching X-Men but my Dad had cancelled some dinner plans for when I was down south so I felt like it might be a bit churlish to go 'yeah thanks, I'm off out now to watch a movie') as I went through the guide to find the first film that was starting that I hadn't seen.


This takes way too long to actually get to the volcano but conversely is a better movie before it erupts. It's filmed almost like a monster movie for it's first 30 mins or so and has some wit to it (the central premise is, let's face it, pretty silly) but seems curiously small scale, mostly focusing on one street and one tunnel. As a disaster movie it's fairly useless - the action beats are laboured (one man's 'heroic' self sacrifice is more laughable than horrible) and Tommy Lee Jones running around in a cardigan is not exactly thrilling.
It ends with an absolutely hilarious bit of social commentary as everyone is covered in ash and a kid can't spot his mother as everybody looks the same (a fireman solemnly declares that the event has made skin colour unimportant or some such nonsense - brilliant and comes from nowhere).

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