Welcome to 5 Favorites. Each week, I will put together a list of my 5 favorites (films, performances, whatever strikes my fancy) along with commentary on a given topic each week, usually in relation to a specific film releasing that week.

This weekend, Roland Emmerich, the finest purveyor of trashy disaster flicks, has his latest release headed to theaters at a time when it’s probably not wanted. That said, his latest looks to be one of his most outlandish yet. Moonfall stars Halle Berry and Patrick Wilson who embark on a space voyage to try and prevent disaster. The moon has been pushed off its orbit and is about to careen into the Earth and destroy it. Likely there are aliens involved, but we won’t really know for sure until we see it. That said, its release has prompted me to look back at some of the best and worst disaster films ever made and while my 5 Favorites are not all great films, they are entertaining pictures that run the gamut from ships sinking to natural disasters to blazing infernos.

The Towering Inferno (1974)

This was the height of 1970s exploitative disaster flicks. Featuring an all-star cast of celebrities, several of whom die over the course of the film, most of what can be accomplished with such films was codified with the release of this 1974 Best Picture nominee. Producer Irwin Allen began his career on the big screen where his first few films as director weren’t the kind of efforts people remembered, but he shifted to TV as a series creator and did quite well for himself with the likes of Time Tunnel, Lost in Space, and Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea. He returned to cinema as a producer in 1972 with The Poseidon Adventure, which was a box office hit. After which he brought us this film.

The story of an ultra-modern residential skyscraper whose builders have used substandard building materials and have unwittingly created a death trap in which hundreds of tenants are trapped on the night of a grand opening gala, their celebrations turned to slaughter. The film was a veritable who’s who of Hollywood at the time including Steve McQueen, Paul Newman, William Holden, Faye Dunaway, Fred Astaire, Jennifer Jones, and many others. It was a riveting spectacle where you weren’t sure who would live and who would die and that was half the fun.

Twister (1996)

Born and raised in the Midwest where tornados are a constant part of life, spring and fall seasons bringing countless opportunities for death and destruction. It’s perhaps why we sometimes feel like we’re made of sterner stuff…or, as in the case of Twister, why some of us have something of a death wish. The film follows a group of storm chasers intent on taking measurements from within a tornado funnel, hoping to make it easier to predict and analyze future potential disasters. The film stars Helen Hunt, Bill Paxton, Cary Elwes, Jami Gertz, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Lois Smith, and Alan Ruck. For anyone who’s even modestly fascinated by tornados, it’s a film filled to the brim with such information.

While death isn’t as important to the picture as spectacle, we get plenty of that as the scientists pursue one storm after another, eventually stumbling into a super cell event that could spawn countless dangerous twisters. What makes the film most eerie is how much information it gets right about the potentiality of dangerous storms in this region. Sure, there are some liberties taken, but for a disaster film, it’s surprisingly accurate. Sure, the narrative is a bit weak, but no one goes to see these films for the plot anyway.

Titanic (1997)

The rule about disaster films simply being pulp entertainment isn’t always true, especially when a serious effort is made to frame the disaster in terms the audience can understand, namely a real situation. Several films have tackled the sinking of the RMS Titanic, but until James Cameron’s epic feature, none had truly done the subject justice. Bookended by a modern-set story involving a the search for a legendary necklace believed to be aboard the ill-fated ocean liner, the audience is taken back in time to the 1912 maiden, and final, voyage of the Titanic with a tale that blends historical and fictional stories together.

Leonardo DiCaprio plays a forgotten (read fictional) Jack, a steerage-class passenger traveling with his buddy to the Americas for untold opportunities, like much of the rest of the others in his area of the ship. He falls in love with a young heiress named Rose, played by Kate Winslet. Their tragic love affair forms the crux of the story and while Winslet, DiCaprio, and Gloria Stuart as the elder Rose, deliver terrific performances, everyone saw the film for the spectacle. Cameron handled the subject matter with great delicacy while trying to hew as closely to the facts of the tragic maritime disaster as possible. It was an emotional film where nearly every element, except the uninspired script, was perfect or nearly so.

My Original Review

Deep Impact (1998)

A handful of times in the 1990s and beyond, two films about similar subjects release within months of each other. 1998 saw two films about an impending meteor strike. One was the garish spectacle that was Armageddon and the other was this more tender, humanistic narrative that focused on the human tragedy of such an event rather than the rah-rah heroics in Michael Bay’s Armageddon. Director Mimi Leder takes an involving script from Bruce Joel Rubin and Michael Tolkin and turns it into a bold, action-filled, destruction-laden motion picture.

While Bay attracted a fairly strong cast of notable names, Leder’s feature had its fair share of talent with Oscar winners Robert Duvall, Vanessa Redgrave, Maximilian Schell, and Morgan Freeman (not an Oscar winner at that point) joined by TV stars Téa Leoni, Ron Eldard, Laura Innes, Richard Schiff, and Blair Underwood. Other prominent names in the cast included Elijah Wood, James Cromwell, and Jon Favreau among myriad others. With a cast like that, you have to expect solid performances and the actors certainly gave the audience that. The wonderful special effects helped aid in the selling of the tragedy of the film’s events and asked us how we would react when imminent danger threatens us. Some people might prefer the largesse and excess of a Michael Bay action film, but give me these more intimate and thought-provoking features any day.

The Day After Tomorrow (2004)

Returning to Roland Emmerich, the director of this week’s latest disaster flick, we look at his last truly enjoyable film, the global warming action drama The Day After Tomorrow. While Independence Day might be his best remembered film, The Day After Tomorrow seemed, at the time, to have a most outlandish narrative. Centered around a frustrated climate scientist (Dennis Quaid) attempting to warn political leaders about the impending threat of global warming, his dire predictions come to fruition as a massive winter storm pulls down from the arctic, instantly freezing the landscape in its path.

While some elements of the film seemed a bit far fetched at the time, recent weather events such as bomb cyclones and polar vortices have brought into stark relief the events of The Day After Tomorrow. Emmerich’s attention to detail and focus on learning from scientific prognostications helped give this film a terrifying staying power. While the film still dwells in the depths of uninspired acting and cheesy narrative plot points, there’s no denying how surprisingly prescient the film is, at least in terms of the climate crisis that awaits us. While there are certainly better disaster films out there, this film deserves a place of honor on this list simply for being a crucial reminder of the dangers we face, fictionalized or not.

My Original Review