Dante's Peak (Special Edition)

The 'old-fashioned' disaster movie scenario enjoyed a brief resurgence in the latter half of the 90s. After the success of Twister and ID4, films like Hard Rain, Titanic, Armageddon and Deep Impact followed in its wake. Like the two competing asteroid movies, Dante's Peak was in competition with the imaginatively named Volcano as THE Lava flow of 1997. Which one is better? Well, comparing the two is like comparing an atomic blast to a popping pimple.

Pierce Brosnan is Harry Dalton, a Vulcanologist (or James Bond in disguise if you want) who predicts a major eruption in the quaint Pacific-Northwestern town of Dante's Peak. No one wants to listen to him since the town has just been named the 2nd most desirable place to live in America and is in the early stages of a thriving economy. It's the politics from Jaws all over again. Despite being shouted down by his superiors, Harry sticks around to keep his eye on the imposing mountain and woo Mayor Wando (Linda Hamilton), who is the only one who believes the 4000-year dormant volcano might blow its top.

If you've seen one disaster movie, you've seen 'em all in terms of character importance. Yes, it's bloody obvious who is going to die, some of these people might as well have a death clock counting down stuck on their foreheads. And the panicking idiot mobs don't deserve anything less firey. When will nameless extras learn that following the crowd isn't the best way? I guess this is the weakest part of Dante's Peak, it never really distances itself from that single, eternal cliché of disaster films.

But the film is really nothing but a showcase for special effects and it does them surprisingly well. Made before the extreme popularity of CGI, Dante's Peak has a lot of real-life destruction, in-camera effects and stunt-work. Yes, there is a fair bit of CGI and for a 10-year-old film they still hold up really well. All Volano (Zzzz...) had to offer was a very, very slight lava flow and an unintentionally hilarious scene with a melting man but with Dante's Peak we get earthquakes, boiled skinny dippers, lakes of acid, ash blizzards that create a unique atmosphere, thunder and lightning, red hot boulders raining down from the sky, mudslides, lava (of course), a massive pyroclastic cloud and lots of deep, deep bass sound effects.

It's not a life-changing film by any means, but as disaster movies go it's one of the best, has an occasionally spooky score and entertains really well despite Brosnan taking it all so seriously. I would have given it a higher rating if they killed the dog (more original) and deleted the annoying Grant Heslov's utterly pointless character.

The Blu Ray presents the film is gorgeous 1080p 2.35:1 with a brilliant DTS HD-MA sound design. None of the extras from the DVD have been ported over. Why?

For picture and sound alone it's a definite must-have for Blu Ray fans.

Dante's Peak is, first, last and foremost, a disaster movie, and consequently it has been comparatively forgotten. But it is a very good disaster movie, one that, whilst containing all the key cliches and stereotyped disaster-flick elements, still manages to be inventive, exciting and visually amazing.
Pierce Brosnan (!!) plays a volcanologist sent to monitor seismic activity on a long-dormant volcano in the Cascade mountains (Mount St Helens, anyone?). Then scary things start to happen (I won't say what they are) and he becomes convinced that the volcano is going to erupt. Of course, nobody believes him, especially not his colleagues, who seem more interested in drinking cups and cups of Linda Hamilton's character's coffee. He still persuades them to call a town meeting to discuss escape plans. And, during the meeting, guess what happens...
Nothing happens and they all go home.
No, I was kidding.
The actors are generally very good, with Brosnan and Hamilton playing the lead roles without going over the top. The film also has a terribly sinister scene where they are all in a metal boat singing to cheer the kids up and they realise that some bad, bad things are happening to their boat. It's really quite scary.
Aside from the occasional blot on the geological copybook with some things happening that are scientifically impossible, Dante's Peak is great-and the special effects are incredible.

The best of the slew of 90s disaster movies that cropped up after Twister did blockbuster business, Dante's Peak may offer surprisingly little lava but it's certainly the most spectacular onscreen volcanic eruption to date and offers more than enough devastation and jeopardy for even the most hardened fan of the genre to feel they're getting their money's worth as the Second Most Desirable Place to Live in the USA (population under 20,000) goes up in smoke.

Most of the usual clichés are there, but they're played rather more credibly than is the norm in these kind of pictures. Rather than simply offering evil property developers trying to hush up the warning signs of an impending eruption at a small town's nearby volcano to protect their investment a la Irwin Allen, it gives sound and rational reasons for not putting the town on alert and equally valid human reasons for why the evacuation is delayed long after eruption becomes inevitable. Rather than pepper the cast with big-name but now-affordable actors in cameos it concentrates on a fairly small group of characters - Pierce Brosnan's volcanologist and his team and Linda Hamilton's mayor and her family - and takes its time to get to know them and the town, which prevents it from spreading itself too thin once the fireworks start. When they do, it's not the run-of-the-mill creeping lava that's the film's biggest threat but the huge pyroclastic cloud of gas, ash and burning rock, though along the way they have to brave crashing helicopters (every disaster movie must have one), acid lakes, burning roads and flooding bridges.

While the smart money was on the same year's more high-concept Volcano that saw LA destroyed in a sea of unlikely plot contrivances, Dante's Peak's more identifiable smalltown focus helped make this one the box-office winner (though neither film broke even). It doesn't hurt that it's an extremely well crafted film, directed with a good eye or a striking visual by Roger Donaldson and performed with more sincerity than cheese to keep things watchable while you're waiting for the special effects. And they're especially good effects too, though the mixture of model shots alternating with computer animation is sometimes a little more noticeable on the small screen than the big.

Unfortunately Universal's Blu-ray isn't much of a showstopper, offering an okay transfer with some very obvious edge enhancement and a very underwhelming soundtrack. Worse, not all the extras from the laserdisc or special edition DVD have been carried over - the US release includes the 62 minute documentary on the making of the film, audio commentary and trailer, but not storyboards, production design sketches, digital effects plates and poster designs, while the international Blu-ray release is completely extras free.