Delicious Doom

Newcastle Herald

Thursday August 27, 1998

IT'S five miles wide and hurtling at unimaginable speed towards a collision with Earth that will result in nuclear winter, towering tidal waves, and massive eruptions of bad dialogue and worse acting.

No, we aren't talking a deafening Hollywood blockbuster in 1998, where cowering movie-goers root for astronauts to nuke giant space projectiles in the nick of time in Armageddon and Deep Impact.

It's the summer of 1979, and the fate of the world rests in the hands of Sean Connery as the American scientist in Meteor.

These three films, separated by nearly two decades, remind us that with disaster movies, as with Halley's comet, what goes around will surely come around.

The resurgence of the cinema of calamity, which began in earnest two years ago with Jan De Bont's Twister, has given plenty of ammunition to pundits who like to hold forth on apocalyptic foreboding.

But while the years leading to 2000 are prime time for paranoia and end-is-nigh cults, there are just as many economic and technological factors driving the new catastrophe boom.

Industry executives acknowledge the edgy millennial mood, but give more weight to the change in audiences and the way Hollywood does business since the last great disaster movie cycle in the 70s.

In essence, Hollywood is doing disaster movies again because it can do them better (at least technically) and because there's a global dimension to the film audience that wasn't present in the 70s.

Add the sense of anything-can-happen fatalism brought on by Big Brother data banks, reports of extraterrestrial sightings, bloody post-Cold War chaos in places such as the Balkans, and the possibility of an atomic exchange between India and Pakistan, and a good disaster movie ? or even, more likely, a terrible one ? can seem like a cathartic escape.

That's the view of professor Richard Landis, a historian who heads Boston University's Centre for Millennium Studies.

Landis, who opened the centre last year as a scholarly clearing house for social, political, religious and cultural trends associated with the arrival of the millennium, believes that the movie Deep Impact and others like it have struck the right nerve.

`The space ship in the movie is called Messiah, and it sacrifices itself to save the Earth. How much more apocalyptic can you get? It's doing much better (at the box office) than anyone expected. And the title Armageddon speaks for itself.

`I think in the end these disaster movies relate to our feelings about technology,' he added. `If our civilisation goes down, it will be because of pollution or something else that we've done to ourselves. The disaster movies tap into our guilt about what we've done to the globe. They represent a form of punishment we can go through in our imagination, but not in reality.'

Dramatic depictions of disasters are also popular, Davis suggested, because they offer `moments of truth for people. People are fascinated by catastrophe because it brings out the best and the worst in us'.

Disaster films flourished in the 50s and early 60s when the fear of nuclear armageddon was a chilling reality. Audiences flocked to films such as The War of the Worlds, which played as allegories for the threat posed by communism.

The second coming of the disaster movie ran from the hugely successful Airport in 1970, an exercise so terrible it earned its own feature-length spoof in Flying High, to Meteor, which crash-landed at the box office and pretty much ended the cycle.

In an era of profound disillusionment and cynicism epitomised by Watergate, movies such as The Towering Inferno depicted nature as a moral force that invariably picked out the bad guys for come-uppance and painful destruction.

Unlike the scenes of masses perishing (the critically savaged Armageddon opens with asteroid fragments showering down on New York, and rather gratuitously lays waste to Paris in the late-going), the 70s films tended toward all-star and almost-star caricatures and focused on who-will-survive suspense.

The late Irwin Allen, who produced Inferno, The Poseidon Adventure and that ultimate bee movie, The Swarm, used to cite human nature as the reason for his films' success: `People chase fire engines, flock to car crashes,' he once observed.

`People thrive on tragedy. The bigger the tragedy, the bigger the audience.'

Allen could hardly have anticipated the quantum leap in movie technology that now makes anything possible on the screen.

`Back in the 70s we were using miniatures and stop-motion and models,' recalled Scott Ross, president of Digital Domain, the cutting-edge Los Angeles company responsible for much of the first-rate effects in Armageddon.

`Today, I can't think of any disaster you could name that we couldn't do.'

`The cycle is back because the new generation of special effects allows it to be reinvented,' said Tom Borys, who tracks box office trends for Entertainment Data Inc in Los Angeles. `These are films that do well all over the world because they're more about action than language. They're universal.'

Now, there's a new generation of people who want to be scared.