Volcano (104 minutes)
We’re handed lava, fires, explosions, fireballs, and ash coating the landscape, but no actual volcano rises up out of the ground. Which is a bummer and sort of misleading...
I dedicate this post to my younger brother who, without fail, sobbed every time we watched this movie. Specifically when his favorite character meets a pretty brutal death. The kid’s got big Cancer vibes, you know?
I firmly believe that disaster movies can be great uniters of taste. In my life, I have horror movie enthusiasts, Pixar connoisseurs, Marvel mavens, comedy quoters, and B-movie lovers. But we can all be brought together by a disaster movie because they follow simple rules and are almost always rated PG-13. These movies have a hold on my generation in particular due to an interesting overlap. While we lived through the 1990s revival of the genre, our parents lived through the first peak, meaning that these movies were on all the time growing up and no one was going to turn them off.
This revival started around the time I was 10 and continued on well into the early aughts. I believe the last one I saw in theaters was 2012 and I was a junior in college. (2012 clocks in at an insane 158 minutes and is about 70 minutes too long.) Growing up in the nineties came with the notion that anytime all hell could break loose in any major city. In a way, these films probably prepped us for the global warming hell we find ourselves in today.
While I do plan to cover other lesser-known entries into the disaster revival like Hard Rain and Night of the Twisters, but I am absolutely thrilled to be starting with Volcano (1997). This movie holds a special place in my heart because my family owned this movie. Which anyone from my generation can tell you, means we watched it a lot. See kids, at that time, our movie selections were made from what we owned, whatever was airing on TV, and rentals that we only got once in a while. This is why I can quote the entirety of Happy Gilmore and A Goofy Movie. We just didn’t have much else to watch.
Volcano came out about 3 months after the more financially successful (by almost twice as much) Dante’s Peak. This is funny given that, now, Volcano ranks higher on Rotten Tomatoes. Remember this as you read on and ponder why this could be.
Volcano stars Tommy Lee Jones, Anne Heche, and Don Cheadle. Which… we can discuss casting in a minute... And here’s the deal: after a massive earthquake rips through Los Angeles, Mike Roark (Jones) Head of LA’s Office of Emergency Management, skips his vacation to help with the response. He leaves behind his oddly immature 13-year-old daughter with a babysitter (played by Susie Essman and who kills it naturally). It’s later discovered by Seismologist Dr. Amy Barnes (Anne Heche) that it wasn’t just an earthquake -- there’s a volcano forming under LA! Of course, no one listens to her, and then well… it erupts and they need to divert lava through the city.
The first third of this movie is a fun who’s who of city department heads. It’s like a live-action Playmobil set or Career Day in elementary school. Not only do we meet Mike from OEM, but we’re introduced to the Head of the Department of Water + Power, Head of Transit, the Fire Chief, and a disembodied Mayor who we only know exists by angry phone calls into OEM. And we can’t forget Mike’s number two, Emmit Reese (Don Cheadle), who spends the entire movie in a control center but still manages to give a compelling performance. Throughout the movie, we’re also meeting “regular” people like subway conductors, nurses, nannies, cooks, and construction workers. I think maybe the only thing we are missing here is an airline pilot ushering people into a hanger for safety.
After we learn about everyone’s careers and opposing viewpoints-- DWP won’t cut power, MTA won’t divert trains-- we quickly learn it doesn’t matter because Anne Heche—sorry—Dr. Barnes is right. There’s lava flowing beneath LA, and we the audience know it! But we have to spend some time with Dr. Barnes and her assistant Rachel, as they try to collect more data to prove their point. Rachel falls into a massive underground crack and melts into some lava, which is all the proof Dr. Barnes needs. It may not be good science but it’s science that works. That’s science that Mike Roark can believe! And he’s going to have to because for a movie named Volcano, we never actually see a volcano.
That’s right. We’re handed lava, fires, explosions, fireballs, and ash coating the landscape, but no actual volcano rises up out of the ground. Which is a bummer and sort of misleading since the movie poster has one and the last shot of the whole movie is a functioning LA with a giant, freaking volcano in the middle of it. But no, somehow the majority of the movie takes place on Wilshire near the La Brea tarpits, and there are lots of fires and lava because no one listened to Dr. Barnes and now people are dying.
Also, not only was Dr. Barnes right about everything but after she’s proved her worth (because women have to, right?) Roark sends her on a babysitting mission to find his daughter. Where is his daughter? She’s at Cedars-Sinai because she got hit by a fireball. Not his fault. But now the lava is heading straight for Cedars! Totally his fault because it’s the one place Roark told everyone in town would be safe! Uh-oh!
So, we have this amazingly brilliant scientist and he decides her time is best spent finding his daughter not, you know, helping to solve the problem which is going to kill thousands more if they don’t get their shit together. This leads me to this: Tommy Lee Jones is not a leading man! At least, not for a disaster flick? We need somebody with a sexy wink, appealing but challenging, and a dark past. Someone that we damaged folks feel a desire to heal! We want a man we can fix. A man we know is good deep down… Tommy Lee Jones is just like, well, your dad put in a highly stressful situation which… Ok? Also, Anne Heche is like half his age in this movie and they sort of try to play with that sexual energy? At least just enough to make us all uncomfortable.
Because our lead, Roark, spends most of his time by the La Brea tar pits trying to divert lava with city buses, we don’t get a ton of time with the other characters (it’s a disaster movie so you know everyone gets separated) but when we do get that chance it is such a breath of fresh air.
And this is how we get one of the most iconic death scenes out of any and all disaster movies. (Wow, this just gave me an idea to rank disaster movie deaths. Note to self!) We get the death of Stan, Head of Transit. Head of the MTA. Our guy John Caroll Lynch. Stan’s death is labeled on YouTube as “A Hero’s Sacrifice” and this two minute scene is the reason my brother cried every time we watched this film. And I mean full-on sobbing, running down the hallway to his room to throw a fit. Sometimes he’d start crying just at the suggestion of putting this movie on. I’m completely serious.
If you haven’t seen Volcano, or it’s been a while, let me set the scene for you:
Stan is a no-bullshit guy. We know this because whoever did his costuming deserves an award. Maybe not an Oscar. But an award. He has his velcro Nikes, Dockers, a bomber jacket over a white shirt and tie. The pocket of his shirt is stuffed with, like, 50 pens. He chews Nicorette and has a nicotine patch on his neck AND a cigarette behind his ear. The man is stressed! He’s keeping the trains on time! On the day of the earthquake/volcano, he is the one that ultimately decides to keep the trains running. (Oh no!) And so when I train gets trapped underground full of early morning commuters, he decides he must be the one to save them. The result of this rescue mission is well, let’s just show you:
*Slow clap.* The Nikes melting on the train is so iconic. And perhaps that is why this movie has captured the souls of people now. Or maybe it is because as Joe Reid from the Decider mentions in his amazing post “20 Years of ‘Volcano’: The L.A. Disaster with Clumsy Racial Overtones That’s NOT ‘Crash’” says: it is a “weekends-on-cable” movie. We’ve all been forced to watch this shit so many times we just “like” it now. Also, please go read that piece by Joe Reid after this. It is an amazing sum up of this picture and an excellent second course if you’re looking for more Volcano.
And actually, the title of Reid’s piece brings me to my final point. You probably read that and said “clumsy racial overtones”. What? Yes. This movie came out in 1997 and is set in LA. We’re talking post-Rodney King, riots, and the OJ verdict. I don’t know why and I wish I could tell you that the writers of Volcano thought that their disaster flick was the perfect opportunity to smooth over racial tension in the city, but I can confirm one of them is white so that’s probably a reason. Anyway, we get a little subplot of a Black man desperately trying to save his neighborhood. It is on fire and they need help. No one wants to help (insert that melting exasperated emoji here) and he is cuffed by a white cop for harassing the fire department. (!!!)
After spending, what seems to me to be HOURS, cuffed in the middle of lava and firestorm, another white cop suggests maybe having this man cuffed is a bad idea. So, they uncuff him. And wouldn’t you know it? The Black man decides to help them move some heavy shit to divert the lava. And in turn, they agree to send the fire department to his neighborhood -- that has been BURNING DOWN FOR HOURS while they’ve been trying to save a MALL and a MUSEUM?
Yes, you’re reading this all correctly. Not only, NOT ONLY, did these writers think they could comment on race relations in LA, but they thought that the solution would be this. Not that the fire department SHOULD be equally helping neighborhoods regardless of who lives there, but that the Black man had to first PROVE himself to be deserving of that help. Jesus. Christ.
They drive this all home with an absolutely horrid ending. Where a child is looking for his mother and notices that everyone is covered in ash. “Look at their faces… they all look the same.” Put a fork in me, I am DONE. I just about lost my mind seeing this all unfold again.
In the end, I could write another 4,000 words on this movie. There’s at least another 1,000 words for Stan’s death and 3,000 words for their commentary on race. And maybe those will come day, but for now I’ll leave you with these thoughts for the day. Why is Volcano ranked higher than Dante’s Peak on Rotten Tomatoes? Do people love social commentary? Do women find Tommy Lee Jones sexier than Pierce Brosnan? (I laughed just typing that btw.) Lend me your thoughts on this.
Volcano. It tries to do too much and does so little.
This made me laugh to the point of tears - both good and bad - great reveiw!
S-T-A-N!!