An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power (2017) [PG] ****

A film review by Scott Tafoya for RogerEbert.com, July 28, 2017.

There is no guaranteeing that you walk into a press screening with a clear head anymore. If you check your phone before walking into a movie, you're liable to read that a career senator took advantage of his office's health care plan, had a cancerous growth removed, then hobbled onto the floor of the Senate to cast a vote saying no other American deserves that treatment. How are you meant to feel anything but disgust when you then sit down to watch a movie about a lifelong environmentalist meeting staunch opposition from the planet he's trying to save? How is this movie not going to seem both more relevant and like a complete waste of everyone's time? An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth To Power (even the title screams for your attention over the horrifying din) chronicles a continuing and exhausting fight to get the world to stop destroying itself on purpose but it's also implicitly about the fight for your attention. Directors Bonni Cohen and Jon Shenk do their utmost to make Al Gore's climate studies seem like the life or death struggle they are, but they're racing a news cycle and the real-time destruction of our civil liberties, and frankly they don't want to play dirty enough to win.

We join Al Gore in 2015, looking a good deal older and tired. With his slow, awkward gait, gray hair and dad jokes, he's out of step with American politics. He's still giving his PowerPoint presentation on the effects of capitalism on the environment, with updated information. He wants to come off folksy, another Jimmy Carter selflessly giving whatever he's got to give to the country that rejected him, but his anger occasionally gets the better of him. Frankly, if he was angry more often this film might not be necessary. He's outmatched and outnumbered, and the best that can be said about him is that he hasn't given up. Of course, he's got time and money with which to continue his crusade to curb greenhouse gases. What about the rest of us?

This is a film set largely in board rooms and hotel rooms while the most powerful people in the globe talk to Gore about considering cap and trade measures to stop their populations from rampantly polluting the planet. Shenk and Cohen make a handful of calculated risks showing us who's in these rooms. A few years ago, choosing to show Cory Booker listening intently to Gore at a Senate committee meeting might have seemed like a good sign. Now that his ties to pharmaceutical companies have been exposed, his attention is just another empty promise from a bought politician. Watching Booker pretending to listen to Gore in one of many silent reaction shots the editors throw around Gore to make sure we know people are moved by his words; I just kept seeing the Jersey democrat embracing McCain on the floor after he voted to kill Obamacare. With friends like these...

Gore lopes through flooded streets and cemeteries like John Wayne in The Shootist. He's got tokens of past failures all around him, and every victory is qualified. He knows how flimsy his future is, even if he heroically refuses to stop. Watching him take in the faces of Floridian public servants smiling nervously as they admit that conditions have never been this bad and then sit and change his wet socks like a man returning from a bad day of fishing show Gore at his most human. Seeing him on a Golden cell phone dropping Elon Musk's name in the hopes of shaking people into taking him seriously show him at his most out of touch and desperate (Musk, it should be said, immediately went to work for Donald Trump when the call came, even if he retired in June). The film basically breaks even in its portraiture of Gore and his reaction to setbacks. The Paris terrorist attacks postpone a call to action broadcast. A small Texas town committing to using 100% renewable energy is undercut slightly by listening to the mayor say, leave the world in better shape than you found it and realizing he doesn't mean human rights. Hell, I was offered a 30-page press kit as I walked into this movie about the importance of recycling. How are we supposed to think this planet has a chance? The final minutes of the movie show Gore, ashen-faced, as he tries to rally his courage and strength after the 45th President is elected. His grief is eminently relatable, even if his composure is not.

The film begins and ends with arresting footage of glaciers melting. The problem is that those images have never been enough, final and incontrovertible though they may be. It's been ten years since An Inconvenient Truth first told everyone in black-and-white how doomed we are if we don't shape up. A lot of people listened, but just as many mocked him and encouraged us not to care. An Inconvenient Sequel shows the twilight of one of our most coherent champions. The glaciers have not stopped melting, every day brings worse news, but Gore has never given into despair. Despair can be paralyzing, he says at one point, accidentally but appropriately sounding like Kyle MacLachlan in Dune (a story of a man trying to save an arid planet from corpulent fascists). Despair is all we've got some days, and try though it might, this film can't curb it. The best An Inconvenient Sequel can offer is the formidable image of Gore, nearly 70, refusing to stand down. It's inspiring, but even the filmmakers have to know it's not enough. I was moved by the movie, and then I stepped outside and looked at my phone. [Tafoya’s rating: 2.5 out of 4 stars = 63%]

Labels: climate-change, disaster, documentary, environment, prophetic

Internet Movie Database 64 

MetaScore (critics=68, viewers=63) 

RottenTomatoes Averages (critics=65, viewers=56) 

Blu-ray 

San Andreas (2015) [PG-13] ***

A film review by James Berardinelli for ReelViews.net on May 28, 2015.

San Andreas is exactly what one might expect it to be - no more and no less. It's as if director Brad Peyton (Journey 2: The Mysterious Island) and screenwriter Carlton Cuse assembled this movie after attending a Disaster 101 course. Although technically not a remake of the 1974 film Earthquake, San Andreas features many of the same plot points: a scientist predicting a quake, an M9.0+ tremblor leveling Los Angeles, the rupture of a dam, and various characters using the cataclysm to resolve relationship issues. Heaving earth, fires, and floods are all part of the mix but the advances in special effects technology allows San Andreas to provide one of the most vivid depictions to-date of mass destruction. It's an orgy for disaster porn devotees.

Although the movie fits effectively into the overall disaster genre, it might be worth considering whether real-world occurrences between 1974 and 2015 have altered our ability to enjoy the film as the escapist romp it intends to be. Can anyone watch the collapse of buildings in Los Angeles and San Francisco and not flash, at least briefly, to 9/11? Is it possible to view the tsunami hit San Francisco Bay, and destroys the Golden Gate Bridge, and not recall the 2004 Indian Ocean event? And, with the earthquake in Nepal still fresh, do the images of mass destruction take on a different shade? With the nightly news becoming a catalog of disaster images, is there room for a hackneyed production like this one? Does San Andreas offer a release from reality or does it remind us of dark events of the not-so-distant past?

San Andreas follows two separate storylines that never converge. Paul Giamatti is scientist Lawrence Hayes, whose research into earthquake prediction has allowed him to forecast the big one just as it's about to happen. Following the death of a colleague at an event that destroys the Hoover Dam, Hayes has been able to validate his methods and the latest data tells him that a two-part disaster is about to unfold in California with both southern and northern epicenters.  After making his pronouncement, Hayes spends most of the rest of the movie huddled under a table next to an attractive TV reporter (Archie Panjabi) who has come to the university to interview him.

Meanwhile, Ray (Dwayne Johnson), an L.A.-based helicopter rescue pilot, finds his plate full once the first quake hits. His first task is to save his soon-to-be-ex-wife, Emma (Carla Gugino), from a collapsing skyscraper. Then, with her in the co-pilot's seat, it's off to San Francisco to protect his college age daughter, Blake (Alexandra Daddario). Blake, accompanied by her mom's cowardly boyfriend, Daniel (Ioan Gruffudd), becomes trapped and is left to fend for herself by her companion. Helped by a couple of British visitors, Ben (Hugo Johnstone-Burt) and Ollie (Art Parkinson), she seeks a reunion with her Mom and Dad, unaware that quake #2 is on its way.

Paul Giamatti is perfectly cast as the rumpled scientist and his scenes are by far the most interesting. It causes one to wonder if San Andreas might have worked better if the entire film had focused on his character. The equally cheesy but more entertaining Twister adopted that approach by making its protagonists storm chasers seeking new ways to predict tornadoes. As rescue fireman Ray, The Rock is miscast. The film not only fails to make use of his unique talents (he throws only one punch) but expects him to do some subtle emoting that's not one of his strong suits. Carla Gugino and Alexandra Daddario are on hand to provide eye candy, with the latter making her first appearance in a bathing suit. It's possible to praise Gugino's acting since it consists mainly of expressing shock and awe at images that were added in post-production.

Whatever quibbles one might have with San Andreas, and the list of problems is a long one (including a bastardization of physics and geography that will give the science community a collective apoplexy), it at least showcases the disaster. Granted, all the most spectacular sequences are available in the trailer, essentially making it unnecessary to sit through the entire 114-minute movie, but at least the film's budget is on screen. The central fault in San Andreas' structure is a common one for disaster movies: with all the attention on the cataclysm, narrative and character development are victimized. As a result, the world is populated by paper-thin caricatures navigating the devastation. What looks impressive in a 30-second TV spot or 2-minute trailer becomes tedious when it's apparent we're going to spend far too much time with the humans. And, as any porn connoisseur will testify, it's all about the money shots not the passages of dialogue in between. [Berardinelli’s rating: 2 out of 4 stars]

Labels: action, disaster, drama, thriller

Internet Movie Database 

Metacritic 43/100 

RottenTomatoes Averages (critics=53, viewers=68) 

Blu-ray 

The Day After Tomorrow (2004) [PG-13] ***/****

Jack Hall (Dennis Quaid) is a paleoclimatologist, studying prehistoric abrupt climate change. He and his research team members were on the Larson B Ice Shelf in Antarctica when it collapsed in March, 2002, and he believes that the increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide is causing a global greenhouse effect, and this global warming is accelerating global climate change. When Jack hears from colleague Terry Rapson (Ian Holm), who heads a research center in Scotland, that the North Atlantic Current is cooling rapidly, he theorizes that it is happening because of all the fresh water being dumped into the North Atlantic by the melting of the Greenland ice sheet. And when devastating tornadoes, typhoons and hailstorms begin to be reported worldwide, Jack becomes convinced that a global climate shift is underway.

Jack and his ex-wife, Lucy (Sela Ward) share custody of their brilliant, teenage son Sam (Jake Gyllenhaal), who is in New York City, competing on a scholastic team. Trapped in the city by increasingly fierce weather, Sam and his teammates Laura (Emmy Rossum) and Brian (Arjay Smith) have taken refuge with others in the public library. And, when Jack and his research team, including Jason (Dash Mihok) and Frank (Jay O. Sanders) analyze the data coming in from Terry Rapson, they realize that a killer storm is headed straight for New York City, and that it will herald the coming of a new ice age on planet Earth.

Co-written and directed by Roland Emmerich, The Day After Tomorrow is a big-budget, special-effects-laden, action/sci-fi/thriller that contains these core elements: (1) the Earth and all of humanity are threatened by our own shortsightedness; (2) a single scientist clearly understands the danger, and uses his intelligence, courage and ingenuity to help the government save lives; (3) humankind recognizes the danger in time and acts to prevent its own extinction. The special effects in this film are thrilling, and the acting is uniformly excellent. Regardless of your opinion about the science of global warming, if you enjoy Roland Emmerich's films Independence Day, Godzilla and 2012, you'll probably enjoy The Day After Tomorrow. 

The film The Day After Tomorrow was inspired by the book The Coming Global Superstorm, a 1999 fictional novel co-authored by Coast to Coast AM talk radio host Art Bell and American science fiction writer Whitley Strieber. Strieber also wrote the film's novelization. The screenplay was written by German film-maker Roland Emmerich (who also produced and directed) and American screenwriter Jeffrey Nachmanoff.

Labels: action, adventure, climate-change, disaster, drama, prophetic, sci-fi, thriller, tragedy
Internet Movie Database 6.4/10    
MetaCritic (critics=47, viewers=64)    
RottenTomatoes Averages (critics=55, viewers=64)     
Blu-ray1     
Blu-ray2

James Berardinelli's review (2.5 of 4 stars)

Deep Impact (1998) [PG-13] ***

Jenny Lerner is a TV news reporter in Washington, D.C. While investigating the resignation of the Treasury Secretary, ostensibly due to his wife's illness, Jenny stumbles across evidence that he has a mistress named Ellie, and that the President knows about her. Things quickly become more serious, however, when Jenny finds herself under FBI arrest, and in an unscheduled meeting with the President. She discovers that the resignation story is only a cover for something far more serious... an E.L.E., or Extinction Level Event, in this case a comet the size of Mt. Everest that is headed straight for a collision with Earth, and threatens to wipe out all life on the planet. Jenny agrees to suppress the story, and days later the President addresses the nation, revealing that a spacecraft has been constructed, and a team of astronauts assembled to rendezvous with the comet, and attempt to change its course so it misses Earth.

On the surface, this film is about a global threat from outer space, and how different people deal with it. But the deeper story is about the nobility of self-sacrifice... how loving, compassionate individuals make a conscious decision to sacrifice themselves so others may live. The screenplay is fast-paced and well-written, with attention given to both the impending global catastrophe and how individuals and families are affected. There are a few plot holes and some scientific inaccuracies, but these can be forgiven in the interest of great story-telling.

Direction, editing, special effects and the musical score are excellent, and the acting talent assembled for this film is terrific, including James Cromwell, Robert Duvall, Jon Favreau, Morgan Freeman, Tea Leoni, Vanessa Redgrave, Mary McCormack, Maximilian Schell, Richard Schiff, Charles Martin Smith, Leelee Sobieski, and Elijah Wood. Deep Impact serves as a reminder that this beautiful blue planet is our only home and that we should treat it and all living creatures on it with loving care. If you enjoyed Armageddon and The Day After Tomorrow, you won't want to miss Deep Impact. 

Labels: action, disaster, drama, family, prophetic, sci-fi, thriller, tragedy, wedding       
Internet Movie Database
Metacritic 40/100
RottenTomatoes Averages (critics=58, viewers=58)
Blu-ray

Armageddon (1998) [PG-13] ***/****

A film review by Roger Ebert, July 1, 1998

Here it is at last, the first 150-minute trailer. Armageddon is cut together like its own highlights. Take almost any 30 seconds at random, and you'd have a TV commercial. The movie is an assault on the eyes, the ears, the brain, common sense and the human desire to be entertained. No matter what they're charging to get in, it's worth more to get out.

The plot covers many of the same bases as the recent Deep Impact, which, compared with Armageddon, belongs on the American Film Institute list. The movie tells a similar story at fast-forward speed, with Bruce Willis as an oil driller who is recruited to lead two teams on an emergency shuttle mission to an asteroid the size of Texas, which is about to crash into Earth and obliterate all life - even bacteria! Their job: Drill an 800-foot hole and stuff a bomb into it, to blow up the asteroid before it kills us. OK, say you do succeed in blowing up an asteroid the size of Texas. What if a piece the size of Dallas is left? Wouldn't that be big enough to destroy life on Earth? What about a piece the size of Austin? Let's face it: Even an object the size of that big Wal-Mart outside Abilene would pretty much clean us out, if you count the parking lot.

Texas is a big state, but as a celestial object, it wouldn't be able to generate much gravity. Yet when the astronauts get to the asteroid, they walk around on it as if the gravity is the same as on Earth. There's no sensation of weightlessness - until it's needed, that is, and then a lunar buggy flies across a jagged canyon, Evel Knievel-style.

The movie begins with a Charlton Heston narration telling us about the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs. Then we get the masterful title card, 65 Million Years Later. The next scenes show an amateur astronomer spotting the object. We see top-level meetings at the Pentagon and in the White House. We meet Billy Bob Thornton, head of Mission Control in Houston, which apparently functions like a sports bar with a big screen for the fans, but no booze. Then we see ordinary people whose lives will be Changed Forever by the events to come. This stuff is all off the shelf - there's hardly an original idea in the movie.

Armageddon reportedly used the services of nine writers. Why did it need any? The dialogue is either shouted one-liners or romantic drivel. It's gonna blow! is used so many times, I wonder if every single writer used it once, and then sat back from his word processor with a contented smile on his face, another day's work done.

Disaster movies always have little vignettes of everyday life. The dumbest in Armageddon involves two Japanese tourists in a New York taxi. After meteors turn an entire street into a flaming wasteland, the woman complains, I want to go shopping! I hope in Japan that line is redubbed as Nothing can save us but Gamera! Meanwhile, we wade through a romantic subplot involving Liv Tyler and Ben Affleck. Liv plays Bruce Willis' daughter. Ben is Willis' best driller (now, now). Bruce finds Liv in Ben's bunk on an oil platform and chases Ben all over the rig, trying to shoot him. (You would think the crew would be preoccupied by the semi-destruction of Manhattan, but it's never mentioned after it happens.) Helicopters arrive to take Willis to the mainland so he can head up the mission to save mankind, etc., and he insists on using only crews from his own rig - especially Affleck, who is like a son. That means Liv and Ben have a heart-rending parting scene. What is it about cinematographers and Liv Tyler? She is a beautiful young woman, but she's always being photographed while flat on her back, with her brassiere riding up around her chin and lots of wrinkles in her neck from trying to see what some guy is doing. (In this case, Affleck is tickling her navel with animal crackers.) Tyler is obviously a beneficiary of Take Your Daughter to Work Day. She's not only on the oil rig, but she attends training sessions with her dad and her boyfriend, hangs out in Mission Control and walks onto landing strips right next to guys wearing foil suits.

Characters in this movie actually say: I wanted to say… that I'm sorry; We're not leaving them behind!; Guys - the clock is ticking!; and This has turned into a surrealistic nightmare! Steve Buscemi, a crew member who is diagnosed with space dementia, looks at the asteroid's surface and adds this place is like Dr. Seuss' worst nightmare. Quick - which Seuss book is he thinking of? There are several Red Digital Readout scenes, in which bombs tick down to zero. Do bomb designers do that for the convenience of interested onlookers who happen to be standing next to a bomb? There's even a retread of the classic scene where they're trying to disconnect the timer, and they have to decide whether to cut the red wire or the blue wire. The movie has forgotten that this is not a terrorist bomb, but a standard-issue U.S. military bomb, being defused by a military guy (played by William Fichtner) who is on board specifically because he knows about this bomb. A guy like that, the first thing he should know is… red or blue? Armageddon is loud, ugly and fragmented. Action sequences are cut together at bewildering speed out of hundreds of short edits, so that we can't see for sure what's happening, or how, or why. Important special-effects shots (such as the asteroid) have a murkiness of detail, and the movie cuts away before we get a good look. The few dramatic scenes consist of the sonorous recitation of ancient clichés. Only near the end, when every second counts, does the movie slow down: Life on Earth is about to end, but the hero delays saving the planet in order to recite cornball farewell platitudes.

Staggering into the silence of the theater lobby after the ordeal was over, I found a big poster that was fresh off the presses with the quotes of junket blurbsters. It will obliterate your senses! reports David Gillin, who obviously writes autobiographically. It will suck the air right out of your lungs! vows Diane Kaminsky. If it does, consider it a mercy killing.

Labels: action, adventure, disaster, sci-fi, thriller

IMDb 67/100 

MetaScore (critics=42, viewers=64)

RottenTomatoes Averages (critics=53, viewers=76) 

Blu-ray 

Dante’s Peak (1997) [PG] ***

A film review by James Berardinelli.

Where are the flying cows (from Twister) when you really need them?

Dante's Peak is obviously predicated on the dubious idea that bigger is better. 1996's Twister brought in hundreds of millions at the box office by showcasing relatively small (if something so destructive can be gauged as small) natural disasters -- namely, tornadoes. The next logical step would be to go for something larger and more devastating. Apparently, hurricanes weren't deemed visually impressive enough and earthquakes have been done to death, so Hollywood has set its sights on volcanoes with not one, but two, similarly-themed disaster flicks. Let's just hope Volcano shows a glimmer more intelligence, not to mention a higher energy level, than Dante's Peak.

No one is ever going to accuse Twister of being a masterpiece of originality, but, as roller-coaster movie go, it's a great deal of fun. Part of the reason is the effective use of audio and visual effects; the other part is that director Jan de Bont knows how to get the adrenaline flowing. Twister is a rush. Dante's Peak, on the other hand, is a bore. Oh, it has its moments, but most of them are concentrated in the final forty-five minutes. The first hour, which is all typical disaster movie setup, is interminable.

In keeping with time-tested formulas, we have a male/female pairing, children and animals in danger, a voice of reason that no one listens to until it’s too late, and a character with a tragedy in the past. Volcanologist Harry Dalton (Pierce   Bond, James Bond   Brosnan) lost his beloved girlfriend four years ago when they were studying an erupting volcano in South America. As a result of this incident, he tends to be jumpy about any possible volcanic activity, and when there are signs that the snowcapped mountain overlooking the tiny Washington state town of Dante's Peak (population 7,400) may be about to blow its top, Harry calls for an evacuation. The local mayor, Rachel Wando (Linda Hamilton), backs him up, but the others on the town council aren't so sure. Enter Harry's boss, Paul Dreyfus (Charles Hallahan), and his group of roving geologists (who look like refugees from Twister's ragged band of storm hunters). Paul, sensitive to the delicate political situation of spreading panic without proper scientific evidence, calls off the evacuation. So, of course, when disaster inevitably strikes, people are needlessly killed.

The first hour of Dante's Peak is spent getting to know the characters. Not that we need that much time, since they're all familiar types. In addition to Harry and Rachel (who predictably become romantically involved), we're introduced to two kids, an independent old lady, and a dog. If you manage to stay awake through fifty-five minutes of drivel, you'll be rewarded with some nifty special effects as the mountain throws everything it has at the town: fire, water, air, and earth. No stone (literally) is left unturned. It's pretty impressive, I admit, but there's an unwelcome sense of déjà vu. As recently as the aforementioned Twister, we've already been there and done that, and it was a lot more enjoyable last time around.

Brosnan and Hamilton gamely try to generate some chemistry, and, while both are appealing in their own right, the moronic plotline and dumb dialogue defeat them at nearly every turn. It will come as no surprise for astute viewers to learn that the screenwriter for Dante's Peak, Leslie Bohem, also wrote Stallone's Daylight. Both movies feature some similarly embarrassing bad lines. Meanwhile, director Roger Donaldson (No Way Out, The Getaway) fails repeatedly to do anything interesting to enliven the proceedings.

Even discounting the first hour, Dante's Peak still isn't all that satisfying. I suppose there's a certain degree of tension as Harry and company flee rivers of molten lava and volcanic shockwaves in their attempt to get out of town before it's buried in ash, but, with everything being done according to a well-established formula, the level of excitement stays low. Once the film is over, you'll likely acknowledge that, although there's some nice eye candy, the experience as a whole leaves something to be desired.

And there aren't even any flying cows to redeem the situation.

Labels: action, adventure, disaster, thriller

Internet Movie Database
Metacritic 43/100
RottenTomatoes Averages (critics=49, viewers=54)
Blu-ray

Twister (1996) [PG-13] ****

Dr. Jo Harding (Helen Hunt) has been obsessed with tornadoes ever since she was a child and saw her father sucked out of the family storm shelter by a deadly twister. Now she leads a rag-tag team of researchers from Muskogee College, Oklahoma, who've developed an instrument pack that can place hundreds of tiny airborne sensors within the tornado's funnel, to report velocity, barometric pressure, etc. The team hopes that the knowledge they gain will help them build a better early warning system, to save more lives.

On the day Jo plans to deploy the pack, her husband Bill (Bill Paxton) shows up with his new fiancée Melissa (Jami Gertz), expecting Jo to have signed their divorce papers. Melissa is a reproductive (sex) therapist who thinks chasing tornadoes is just a metaphor, and is she in for a surprise! Bill is also in for a surprise as another team led by Dr. Jonas Miller (Cary Elwes) has developed a similar instrument pack, and now the race is on to see who can gain first glory by defying danger, placing their instrument pack in the tornado's damage path and then getting safely out of the way.

This is a great action adventure thriller, and the special effects showing tornadoes and their destructive power are very realistic. There are several scenes inside the National Severe Storms Laboratory (NSSL) and of the various instruments used to track storms. There's great chemistry between Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton as they come to understand how similar they really are, both professionally and personally. The supporting cast is excellent, especially Jami Gertz as an intuitive, emotional therapist who realizes that she can't compete with the adrenalin rush of chasing real tornadoes; Lois Smith as Jo's Aunt Meg, who survives a direct tornado strike on her home; and Philip Seymour Hoffman as Dusty, a slightly unhinged member of Jo's team who idolizes Bill, but whose tornado-chasing stories terrify Melissa. Twister was co-written by Michael Crichton (Jurassic Park), and was directed by Jan de Bont (Speed, Speed 2: Cruise Control). The soundtrack is incredible, including tracks by Van Halen, Eric Clapton and Deep Purple. Twister will suck you in!

Watching the scenes with Bill Paxton and Philip Seymour Hoffman together, it's hard to accept that 22 years after filming, they are both gone, Hoffman in 2014 and Paxton in 2017.

Labels: action, adventure, disaster, drama, thriller, tragedy
Internet Movie Database 6.3/10
Metacritic 68/100
RottenTomatoes Averages (critics=60, viewers=64)
Blu-ray1
Blu-ray2