Most survivable disaster movie?
I was taken with this bit in The Cut about which on-screen natural disasters would be the most fun and survivable. The dirty little secret of disaster movies is that we all imagine ourselves making it through to the final scene, whereas in reality, we’d all be screaming extras who perished in the opening few minutes.
Well, except for me. I’d make it through.
But I’d have my preferences.
The list in The Cut was actually sorted by how scared the writer would be in each scenario, a ranking worth beefing over all on its own. But in the interests of brevity, this was her pick, from least to most scary.
Titanic.
Twister.
Contagion.
Outbreak.
The Poseidon Adventure.
Volcano/Dante’s Peak (basically the same movie).
Deep Impact.
San Andreas.
The Day After Tomorrow.
And coming in at number one…
The Perfect Storm.
There’s lots to argue about here. Like, I don’t know how a hurricane beats out a comet strike on the scary scale, but maybe she’s got big wave phobia or something.
The more interesting question is, if you were in them, which would be most survivable? Admittedly not The Perfect Storm because everyone dies. Sorry for the 20-year-old spoiler. For the others, I guess proximity counts. For Perfect Storm, too. I survived the actual storm on which it was based perfectly well down here in Brisbane. I think I’d have done okay sitting in a nice hotel in New England as well. On the boat going up that Godzilla wave? Yeah, okay, prolly not.
So, assume you’re for real stuck in the plot.
Probably Twister would be the most survivable if you can get to a decent storm cellar or even an underground car park. The volcano movies, too, unless you were some sort of numpty who insisted on climbing up and into the giant angry fire mountain instead of just getting into your SUV and putting the pedal to the metal.
Least survivable? The asteroid impact one. My memory is that the kids in peril, and perhaps their dog too, managed to live through that one and the mile-high tsunamis by running uphill really fast, which I probably could have done ten years ago, but not with my creaky old knees now.
But still, it’s a proximity thing. Most of these would be eminently survivable from the front deck of my house in Brisbane, watching on with a cup of tea. They only seemed to affect the east and west coasts of America.
Ha- I love a good apocalypse scenario! Ever since I was a kid and read "On the Beach" and "Alas, Babylon," I've wanted to write one. Achievement unlocked with "Light's End," which in a way was my answer to "Independence Day," the world's dumbest alien invasion movie IMO.
Titanic should be way more terrifying, not just because it was a real disaster, but because most of us would be in steerage on that voyage as the peons we are, and discovering that the gates to the deck and the life boats were locked and we were going to be left to drown is the stuff of nightmares. JB of course would be the only exception, swanning it in first class. We'd have to hope he'd come downstairs and speak sternly to the functionary with the keys...
The thing that got me about Dante's Peak was the moment in the flashback to Pierce Brosnan's tragic back story where he's very sensibly in his SUV getting the hell out of dodge with a different volcano, and a rock smashes through the roof of his car, strikes his partner and fractures her skull and she dies in his arms. The actress did a great job, looking quite baffled as she puts her hand to her head and then blood starts running down her face and you see the lights go off in her eyes. The sheer mundanity of that accident haunted me about that movie.
Screw the dumb kids and the dog putting themselves in unnecessary danger, the real terror of natural disaster movies are the random and inescapable ways people die in them, despite their best efforts and expertise. I want to see a natural disaster movie where the expert who should have been the hero and got everyone to safety buys it in the first 5 minutes and then it's 90 minutes of idiots like me trying to survive when odds are we absolutely should have bought it 40 minutes earlier.