Volcano (1997)
Directed by Mick Jackson
An earthquake shatters a peaceful Los Angeles morning and opens a fissure deep into the earth, causing lava to start bubbling up. As a volcano begins forming in the La Brea Tar Pits, the director of the city's emergency management service, working with a geologist, must then use every resource in the city to try and stop the volcano from consuming LA.
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What critics compared Volcano to
But “San Andreas” is never scary, not in its torrents of lowest-bidder computer-generated imagery, not amidst story elements that evoke the ill-fated 1997 Tommy Lee Jones vehicle “Volcano,” and especially not when Caltech seismologist Lawrence Hayes (Paul Giamatti) tells us how scary they are, mostly with junk science and an early, unearned emotional catharsis.
Earthquakes haven't been exploited at the movies as much as one would think (most prominently in 1974's Earthquake, which brought us the Sensurround gimmick), but those with long-memories can cross-reference 1997's Dante's Peak and Volcano, which are more or less the same movie as (each other and) San Andreas, except with geysers of lava.
Every generation gets its disaster epic where parts of California rumble under shifting tectonic plates and the Hollywood sign reads " O LYW OD," whether it's "Earthquake" (1974) or "Volcano" (1997) or the new entry, "San Andreas."
Not since, good Lord, maybe Volcano back in 1997 have I seen a disaster movie so painstakingly eager to be the most prototypical disaster movie it could possibly be.
Being a disaster movie, The Core is more notable for how many things it borrows than how many things it invents: in this case, the general shape of the first act from 1997's Volcano (man, Volcano, there's a movie I haven't thought about in a fucking lifetime) - or the exact, specific first act from 2009's 2012 , if only it had existed at the time - is welded onto the second and third acts of 1998's Armageddon .
In an echo of the spring of 1997, when "Dante's Peak" and "Volcano" promised moviegoers death by lava, and the summer of 1998, when "Deep Impact" and "Armageddon" threatened audiences with extinction via asteroid, "White House Down" arrives three months and a week after "Olympus Has Fallen," a very similar story about a tough agent turned rescuer/avenger after circumstances trap him inside the White House during an armed assault that -- worst case scenario -- could escalate into nuclear war.
None of the actors are important, and they go through their paces about as memorably as Tommy Lee Jones did in “Volcano” (this sort of picture is hardly a vehicle for thespian depth).