Dante’s Peak is a film about a man that says a volcano is going to erupt, and then the volcano erupts.
Sometimes Hollywood does this weird thing where two competing production companies rush to get the same basic movie out to the public. We saw it a few years ago with Olympus Has Fallen and White House Down, we saw it in ’98 with Armageddon and Deep Impact. We also saw it with A Bug’s Life and Antz. And in ’97, we had Dante’s Peak and Volcano come out within three months of each other. I, for some reason, watched both of these movies recently.
Dante’s Peak is directed by Roger Donaldson, who also directed The World’s Fastest Indian (2005) and No Way Out (1987). It was written by Leslie Bohem, who’s biggest success was probably writing the 90s Stallone action movie Daylight. He also wrote one of the biggest box office turds in history with The Alamo in 2004.
Harry Dalton (Pierce Brosnan) is a volcanologist called in from vacation to investigate seismic activity at Dante’s Peak, which is a town built at the base of a volcano. The entire time, everyone is treating Harry like an unstoppable workaholic who is married to his job, except he’s not, he was ordered to come back to work by his boss. But the script wants us to see Harry as a man possessed when it comes to volcanoes. You see, a volcano murdered Harry’s old girlfriend, as we see at the start of the movie. It reminded me how Helen Hunt in the movie Twister has a grudge against tornadoes because a tornado murdered her dad when she was a little girl. This movie is around equal levels of dumb. Harry gets to Dante’s Peak and he is shown around by Rachel Kwando (Linda Hamilton) who has to play the role of town mayor, coffee shop owner, single mother, tour guide and love interest for Harry. It’s a lot of nonsense written into one character, but Linda Hamilton does her damndest to drag anything out of Pierce Brosnan.
Here’s the thing with Pierce Brosnan – he’s a great James Bond. He plays that role of charismatic ladies man / cold blooded killer very well. But playing the role of every-man like he does here, it’s just not in his wheelhouse.
Anyway, Harry finds more signs that a volcanic eruption is imminent and oh shit, we need to warn the whole town that there’s probably an impending disaster. But there’s a problem – we’re only 20-minutes in. We need to stall! We have a feature length movie here! So the movie suddenly makes Harry’s boss into an ignorant bad guy who is playing politics and he stops the town from being warned because he doesn’t want to needlessly effect the town’s economy by making people think it’s about to be blasted off the face of the Earth by a volcano. So we spend the next 40-minutes or so just padding out the run time. The movie just dawdles around. Uhh, what should we do until the volcano explodes? Ehh, maybe more bad romance stuff between Harry and Rachel. Maybe we have a shitty robot that tries to climb into the volcano. Maybe there’s like a small earthquake or something. Let’s add a subplot where the local helicopter pilot is a greedy prick.
The one thing that I do love about this movie is how it treats the volcano like a horror movie monster. It’s there, looming in the background of each shot. The protagonist is warning everyone about it but no one wants to listen. Birds flee from it, small animals are dying. It’s first victims are even a pair of skinnydipping youngsters who get boiled to death in a hot spring. And then later when the volcano finally does blow, lava is showing up everywhere like a monster chasing away the good guys. It’s actually hilarious.
I don’t want to say that Pierce Brosnan and Linda Hamilton have zero chemistry together or anything, but it’s just that their characters having nothing in common outside of being sad, lonely, middle-aged people. And Harry’s old flame being killed by a volcano at the start of the movie really has no baring on the rest of the film. The biggest problem here though is that Harry has no impact on the plot. He achieves virtually nothing. He just hangs around telling anything with two ears that the volcano is about to erupt and everyone’s like “ehhh, are you sure?” And then finally the volcano erupts.
Harry has done nothing at all to impact the story or move the plot along. He’s just been there. If Harry showed up the same day that the eruption happened, nothing would have been different. It’s all so Harry can get his “I told ya so” moment. And the second it happens, his boss reverts back to being a team player again.
There’s some real comical stuff in the all the chaos, I’m just going to lay it out in dotpoints.
- After the volcano erupts, the greedy helicopter pilot crashes his chopper and goes up in flames. Harry gets on the radio and very seriously requests that the fire service come out to put out the fire. THERE IS A VOLCANO ERUPTING.
- Harry attempts to drive through a river in a 4WD. He gets bogged. The only reason he gets freed is because another person of equal intelligence drives into the river and crashes into him.
- Ruth – the stubborn old grandma who refuses to believe that the volcano she lives on could ever erupt – jumps into a lake full of acid to tow a dinghy with her family in it to safety. Except the dinghy was like five feet away from the dock anyway.
- In the same acid lake, Harry decides to paddle the boat, using his shirt as a glove to protect his hands. The acid is literally eating a steel boat, but his shirt will do the trick. They should make boats out of the same material as Harry’s shirt.
- Harry’s boss dies a horrible, tragic death. He is trapped on a bridge that is being slept away by a landslide while all of his colleagues watch on in horror. The moment is then killed by the filmmaker’s decision to add a Wilhelm scream.
- Harry, Rachel and Rachel’s kids are in a car when they are cut off by a stream of lava. Rachel stupidly asks “can we drive over it?” (referring to the lava). Harry, an expert volcanologist replies with, “I don’t know”. They then proceed to drive over the lava. They get bogged, in the lava. But Harry just keeps flooring it and eventually the car gets free.
- With all four tyres of their car melted, they are still able to outrun the eruption.
It’s some real dumb movie stuff. But if you’re watching Dante’s Peak, it’s probably not for how cerebral and realistic it is. Honestly, the movie does look good visually. The special effects are mostly practical, using models and sets rather than CGI and it the effects hold up pretty well 20+ years later. Also, the town itself is very scenic and the shots of the town with the volcano in the background are very pretty. It definitely has a very Mount St. Helens feel going with it and I figure that was intentional.
As far as dumb disaster movies go, Dante’s Peak is definitely one of them. But you can probably switch your brain off and enjoy watching the mountain go boom. Is it better than Volcano? Ehh. Script-wise, no (although that is a low bar). Visually, yes.
Rating: ★★
Zero Stars 