Dante's Peak. - book reviews

USA Today (Society for the Advancement of Education), May, 1997 by Christopher Sharrett

As if in anticipation of our apocalyptic yearnings at the end of the century, each time we turn around, the cinema offers us a new take on the disaster film. We already have seen the new spins on tornadoes and alien invasions; now, nature has another time-honored form of revenge upon a smug, self-satisfied human population in the form of erupting mountains. The recent "Dante's Peak" is a warm-up, along with a couple of made-for-TV lookalikes. for "Volcano," wherein a hapless Los Angeles faces yet another Armageddon as a long-dormant volcano combines forces with the San Andreas fault to turn L.A. into a postmodern Pompeii. A cursory glance tells us that there is nothing new about any of this.

"Dante's Peak" is a composite of the disaster cycles of the 1970s in ways that show how exhausted and imaginatively bankrupt the commercial entertainment industry currently is. The picture is a composite of "Jaws" and "Earthquake," with young, insightful scientists. who have roughly the position of the prophet Isaiah, warning the decadent order of its impending doom. Geologist Pierce Brosnan attempts to tell the prosperous Northwest region town that a previously sleepy and verdant mountaintop may bury their hopes for a burgeoning tourist industry. Similar to the Roy Scheider character in "Jaws," the Brosnan character is a battle-weary veteran who, like Captain Ahab, has suffered at the hand, of his foe. Like untold frontiersmen in westerns who "know Indians," he understands his opponent so well he comes close to identifying with it. Of course, this level of knowledge gives the hero a certain immunity. Viewers know he will not be killed, since the adversary seems to have a grudging respect and wants endless rematches (and sequels).

Blind self-interest

On the other side, we find the Ordinary Folk who, when not merely plain stupid and arrogant, are motivated by the self-interest that marks their community as a contemporary Sodom. Like the mayor and businesspeople of "Jaws" who want to keep the beaches open despite evidence of sharkfins in the surf, the commercial leaders of Dante's Peak (the town's name, with all its invocations of The Inferno) think the skiing business can't tolerate talk of lava flows.

Then, there is the Young Single Mother (Linda Hamilton), who immediately becomes smitten with the geologist's good looks and uncanny prescience. There is the usual soap-opera buildup, as all the petty travails of the town rapidly are reduced to rubble when the earth starts to pop. Formulaically, like the slight tremors in "Earthquake" and the severed arm in "Jaws," the coming disaster is presaged as a young couple mysteriously are parboiled in a natural sauna and the hills suddenly have the odor of rotten eggs.

All this is merely the prelude for the computer graphics whiz kids of contemporary film production design when The Big One comes. Some devastating explosions are followed by a really devastating explosion that returns Dante's Peak to prehistory, but with the hero and his new family relatively unscathed.

Perhaps most disturbing about "Dante's Peak" is the film scholar's recognition of what violence it does to the mini-genre of the volcano film. Yes, there is such an animal. The best representation of the form is probably "The Devil at Four O'Clock," the 1961 Mervyn LeRoy movie with Spencer Tracy and Frank Sinatra about an aging missionary and four convicts who sacrifice themselves to save leper children from a volcano-doomed South Seas island. There is an affecting moment at the conclusion when convict Sinatra, who has a chance to escape, returns to Tracy and his fallen comrades, who have made possible the rescue of the children. This is a disaster picture about people discovering their value to themselves and to each other. It doesn't have the nihilism of the 1970s films or the phony optimism of "Dante's Peak."

Gateway to mystery

In "Journey to the Center of the Earth" (1959), an adaptation of the Jules Verne novel, a dormant volcano is a gateway to mystery, to the secrets--often threatening, often wondrous--that make up this planet. Meanwhile, 1968's "Krakatoa, East of Java" exploits the spectacular potential of the volcano movie. Although this picture has a vacuous script and is slim on the most elementary facts (Krakatoa actually is west of Java), at least the film did not try to link its events to some moralistic Doomsday.

Motion pictures such as "Dante's Peak" and "Volcano" derive their force not just from the assumption that ticket buyers enjoy watching things blow up on the screen, but that these explosions are part of some larger wish-fulfillment and that total destruction of our civilization is something we deserve. The current spate of "All-Time Disaster" television shows on the Fox Network speaks not just to the rubbernecking culture of the present that revels in the suffering of others, but evinces a society profoundly disgusted with itself. Such a cynical philosophy assumes that narratives of doom, even of the most contrived and formulaic variety, are just about the only appropriate reflection of all that we think and believe.