A-List: Five Best Disaster Movies
By J. Don Birnam
July 14, 2014
BoxOfficeProphets.com
I mean, first of all, who doesn’t like to see their favorite landmarks blown to smithereens? Or recognized actors sacrificed to Mother Nature’s wrath? More interesting still is to go back to old disaster movies and laugh a bit at the somewhat dated effects and, even better, see some now famous celebrities get chopped in half when they had a two-bit role.
But, by far the best part of disaster movies is that, despite their complete formulaic predictability, they generally manage to entertain, amuse, and excite. Oh, make no mistake about it, I have studied the disaster movie formula well. The noble sacrifices. The animals warning of impending danger. Briefing the President. The implication that mankind’s greed/stupidity/love of pollution is responsible for the end of the world. A family reconciliation with an unwitting and scrappy hero. Someone getting compartmentalized to die. Most of these elements appear in some form or another in any disaster movie who calls itself a respectable film.
So which are arguably the Best Five of all time? Before we get into it, you should know by now that I like rules - even if they are artificial ones. So let’s make sure we know what we are talking about. Movies about horrific critters destroying a city or terrorizing humanity are not really disaster movies - thus, Jaws, Arachnophobia, or even Hitchcock’s The Birds are not disaster movies. Spoofs, funny as they are, also don’t count. Sorry Airplane! Movies about man-made disasters that end up with destruction of fun places also do not count—so don’t expect to see, for example, Air Force One or White House Down on the list. And, finally, just to save everyone a headache, I’m not going to count Titanic as a disaster film, even though it obviously is. Unfortunately, this also disqualifies what is probably one of the best disaster movies of all time - The Poseidon Adventure.
I am, however, going to make alien invasion movies count. Essentially, my criterion for putting something on this list is simple: if it’s a Sim City recognized disaster, then it fits the bill. And, as you may know, alien invasions and destructions of your city are one of the most devastating challenges of that game. To be clear, other disasters like virus outbreaks, hurricanes, tornados, etc., are also fair game under these rules. Godzilla is a harder question - the implication, after all, is that he’s the result of essentially a nuclear meltdown. But I don’t think any of the versions of the movie I’ve seen merit being on the list anyway.
I will say this is the hardest list I have had to make for the A-List so far. Disaster movies are everywhere and it is hard to choose. I will give honorable mentions to two movies I know people would have mocked me incessantly for putting on the list: Armageddon and 2012. Yes, I know the former is excessively cheesy and the human-element plot infinitely annoying. I realize that the latter features the same airplane escape scene over and over and over again. But the world destruction scenes in both are so amazing (each for their own decade) and the stereotypical clichés in each so hilariously played out that I could watch either movie repeatedly.
I am also partial to Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds. I realize that this movie came out at the height of anti-Tom Cruiseness, and that Dakota Fanning as a casting choice is problematic, but I enjoy the H.G. Wells story enough and thought that the re-imagination of it into modern times was clever and terrifying.
Two more honorable mentions. Outbreak, a virus/biological warfare disaster movie that probably stays out because of the lack of Earth-destruction sequences. But the movie is subtle yet smart, deliberate yet gripping, and positively terrifying if you consider it was made at a time when Ebola was scaring the world. Donald Sutherland is amazingly evil, and Morgan Freeman can be counted on to save the day. Did I mention he’s a disaster movie staple? Do not despair, another virus outbreak movie did make my list. And Morgan Freeman.
So that was a mouthful. You can tell I watch a lot of these. So I had to narrow it down to just a measly five. Here’s what I came up with.
5. Independence Day.
Perhaps the quintessential summer blockbuster, this aptly-titled alien invasion/disaster film has it all. There are noble sacrifices by none other than the President himself compliment a redeeming ultimate sacrifice by an unlikely, quirky hero. We see massive destruction scenes for several cities, including of course New York and the White House (when it was still fun to destroy New York; it became cliché and perhaps even risqué in the early 21st Century). The cast is varied as it is amusing, with Will Smith providing perhaps the weakest link to an otherwise strong Bill Pullman and Jeff Goldblum. Nor do the cameos by now more famous actors (Vivica Fox and Harry Connick Jr.) disappoint.
But, above all, this movie features a tried and true message of all reliable disaster flicks: America will eventually save the day, F- yeah! A sequel is supposedly in the works, and I will gobble it up like popcorn at the movies. I only hope that it can be half as amusing and at the same time trite, clichéd, and ridiculous as Ronald Emmerich’s first appearance on my list.
4. The Towering Inferno
The oldest (and perhaps most derided in retrospect) movie on the list is the 1974 Best Picture nominee, The Towering Inferno. Featuring a positively amazing cast of past and future Oscar winners - Steve McQueen, Paul Newman, Faye Dunaway, and William Holden (and a nominated turn by none other than Fred Astaire!) - this movie was in its time considered the best of its genre in that decade.
Inferno tells the story of a deadly fire that breaks out in and during the opening of the Glass Tower, supposedly the world’s tallest building. A series of unfortunate events permits the blaze to expand quickly and renders rescue nearly impossible, leaving a significant number of hapless victims to meet untimely and fiery deaths. The movie has it all: the not-so-subtle allusions about how the greed of mankind is responsible for the world’s ills; the sacrifice by the unlikely hero; the gruesome demise of sympathetic characters; and even the horror film-esque message that those who stray into adultery from moral ways are fated to meet a disturbing, crispy death.
What’s interesting about this movie is that it takes itself absolutely seriously (unlike some of the other disaster films, notably Independence Day) and even delivers on some compelling drama between some characters (again, unlike most of the disaster films you will encounter). And, for its time, some of the effects are terrifying - perhaps because this disaster seems much more likely than any other on this list…
Oh, and if all of this is not enough to convince you to watch this movie, don’t forget the secondary role played by now-convict O.J. Simpson.
3. 28 Days Later
Before he hoisted the little golden man for his helming of Slumdog Millionarie, Danny Boyle toiled in arguably the bottom of the movie barrel with this independent disaster/apocalyptic/horror flick. An early day augur for The Walking Dead, this movie, of course, tells the story of a gripping virus that takes over humanity and seemingly wipes it out within 28 days, during which time our hapless hero/victim lay in a coma.
This movie makes the list because it is so different than any of the other disaster movies you will see (and perhaps because it is not strictly a destruction/disaster movie as much as it is a post-apocalyptic horror movie). In any event, the movie is positively gripping, terrifying, and absolutely merciless. Whereas one expects a noble sacrifice and one emotional but necessary death of a beloved character in your typical disaster movie, 28 Days Later offers no such facile reprieves. Nor does it, unsurprisingly, offer an easy or palatable denouement to leaves the audience feeling like the roller coaster has ended and one is safely back on land. To the contrary, what little hope the movie leaves by the end is shrouded in an aura of mystery and anxiety, and one simply does not know the ultimate fate of the main characters.
The movie became a sleeper hit and spawned a much lesser sequel, but it remains one of the most entertaining disaster/end of the world movies of all time.
2. The Day After Tomorrow And so we arrive at the top two - the guilty pleasures. Oh, I would not for one instance begrudge you arguing that, at the very least, Inferno or 28 Days deserve a higher position than this other Ronald Emmerich flick. But I found The Day After Tomorrow so entertaining and so full of the old disaster movie clichés in new and creative ways that I had to put it high on the list.
And this movie, it has it all. Briefing of the President. Noble sacrifices. Familial reconciliation (Dennis Quaid and an impossibly dreamy Jake Gyllenhaal). Animals - droves of animals - warning of impending danger. The not-so-subtle implication that humans are responsible for the end of the Earth. The clichés are as plentiful as the snow.
At the same time, it contains its fair share of added twists, which is what ultimately makes the movie great. The conclusion offers a new twist on an old problem - the North/South divide of the world is reimagined. Some of the ways to die are singularly creative - in the eye of a deadly ice hurricane no less. The destruction scenes are new and refreshing - New York is gone, but so is Los Angeles (in a scene where, once more, the fornicating couple bites it - are we sure this is a horror movie moniker and not a disaster movie trick?). And, of course, we have the skeptical humans who don’t believe in the impending disaster until the end (a device resorted to from time immemorial in disaster-type movies, from Jaws, to 2012, and beyond).
The Day After Tomorrow was rightly panned by critics. The science is ridiculous and misleading to a point of almost criminality. Some of the sequences are wooden and repetitive, like the interactions between Gyllenhaal’s character, his love interest, and her own crush. But, forgive me, no one does end of the world disaster silliness better than Emmerich and this movie delivers the clichés and contrivances in unapologetic droves.
Few movies make me laugh more than the Day After Tomorrow, which makes it second on my list.
1. Deep Impact
But the disaster movie that I can watch, and have watched, several dozen times, is the Tea Leoni, Robert Duvall, Morgan Freeman, Maximilian Schnell, Vanessa Redgrave and, let’s not forget, Elijah Wood disaster movie par excellence. The movie has it all and more - presidential politics and intrigue, again familial reconciliations and noble sacrifices, moments when all hope is lost, animals fleeing from danger, and humans making the wrong move that results in their demise.
Not only that, but it has an entire outer space rescue mission sequence, which copycat Armageddon could only helplessly emulate. I also enjoyed the destruction scenes (Manhattan, of course, bites it), as they were simple in the humans-running-plus-things-falling kind of way, while imaginative in the tsunami and meteor shower variety.
And I can watch Deep Impact because it does not try too hard but it delivers just enough combination of entertainment with seriousness to be watchable both as a completely trite disaster cliché that lives within the annals I have explored here, and also as a marginally more serious human drama about the choices that one would make if we knew the world were about to end.
This is probably makes me like this movie above all others. The entire sequence regarding the lottery to save certain Americans, and the difficult decisions and choices that this mechanism spawns make the movie unique and interesting from a psychological perspective. 2012 attempts crudely to emulate this exploration of how individuals would deal with the impending end, but it doesn’t work for many reasons, none the least of which is that the quickness with which the world crumbles apart makes it impossible for the filmmaker in that movie to really set up the narrative of what the “arc” system means. In Deep Impact, by contrast, because the disaster is several months in the making, both humanity and the viewer have a chance to ponder their fates. So, believe it or not, I’m calling this an actually thoughtful disaster movie, on top of clichéd and absurdly fun.
So, have at it - what are your favorite disaster flicks?