Tag Archives: Disaster movie

The Day After Tomorrow (2004).

Ah, a mid-career Roland Emmerich disaster movie (he has done very little else in terms of genre). 

It has Dennis Quaid in it and I’ll watch him in anything. A young(ish) Jake Gyllenhaal also features. It’s an almost intriguing casting mix. 

The movie: I found the special effects to be balls. The ecological stuff didn’t make sense to me, but then I failed all science subjects at school so what do I know, eh. The blatant politics annoyed me – it was all rammed with attacks on the environmental nonchalance of the then-Republican administration. 

Not much characterisation and the dialogue consisted of folk giving other folk directions or ‘scientific’ info. It ends up with wolves chasing the cast around because the writers couldn’t think of anything else to put in the script. But some of it was funny. Dennis Quaid dons an epic bunnet, for example. 

I have nothing else to add. 

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Twisters (2024).

Several things about this movie annoyed me prior to watching it: it’s a reboot of a disaster flick that isn’t any good, it features that immensely vexing bloke from Top Gun: Maverick (2022), and I hate films about the weather – aside from Groundhog Day (1993), which is weather as MacGuffin.

Barrels resembling Quint’s annoyed me. It’s an opening wee scene and a protagonist introduces herself via one of these vlogs and there are barrels in the frame. At least be subtle in your references.

Dialogue was from the dustbin and I could predict almost every other line a character was about to say.

Some of it is good – the effects are splendid. There is at least chemistry between the leads. 

But one of the characters is the spitting image of Noah Tannenbaum from season three of The Sopranos, so this loses half a star. 

1.5/5. 

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Volcano (1997) isn’t exactly volcanic.

Volcano (1997) has it all – highly convenient money shots, ludicrous dialogue, every character intro cliché in the book, and the usual late ’90s anything-goes-because-logic-doesn’t-matter action. 

The effects are sometimes great, sometimes shite, and usually just ordinary. Anne Heche is in this and looks like she was made to by her agent. Tommy Lee Jones looks bored off his tits in another one of those “It paid the bills and got me a yacht” performances. And an armoured division of fire engines defeat lava. 

Better than Dante’s Peak (1997), though. 

Testament to a looney age.  

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