During the “volcano unit” of my junior year Geoscience class, my teacher decided an activity we could do before our Thanksgiving break was watch a volcano disaster movie and track its scientific accuracy throughout the movie. The movie that we watched is known as Dante’s Peak . The focus of the activity was to test our knowledge of volcano science and apply it to the movie, but while I did that, I found several things about Dante’s Peak that I “gravitated” to. I did NOT like the movie; several scenes had me questioning such things as the movie’s pacing, sequencing, and logic. For me, “Dante’s Peak” had big problems when it came to the originality of its plot, the pacing, characters, and logic.

The main problem that seems to plague Dante’s Peak is how predictable, bland, and uninteresting its story is. While it doesn’t have the problem that plagues some other disaster movies, like having an incomplete build up to the disaster, when I saw the first few minutes of this movie,, I could predict exactly what was going to happen. The movie follows many common disaster movie ideas. It includes those “doubters”, who feel so secure about themselves that they deny the obvious incoming disaster, and this movie makes it especially hard to believe that trope this time around. For example, the grandmother of some of our main characters, named Ruth, thinks the mountain won’t erupt, that Dante’s Peak is fine. Now that is understandable; there is historical evidence that people told to evacuate during the Mount St. Helen's situation had a similar response. However, the movie just keeps using that excuse over and over. Even when the mountain does erupt, Ruth still says “the mountain won’t hurt us” and refuses to leave. Only when lava bursts in does she actually flee. While certainly it’s possible for people to refuse to evacuate, even with such reasoning as “the mountain will not hurt us”, there’s no explanation for why Ruth is so die hard.  “Stay here” before it made sense but when the mountain started erupting, it just doesn’t hold that much weight anymore. My logic is that

I mentioned the main characters earlier; let’s talk about them, especially what we know, or, more abundantly, what we don’t know about them. Our main character is just a good-looking, now- single, “charismatic” geo-scientist played by Pierce? Brosnan, and well, that’s all we find out about him. He knows about volcanoes and cares about other people. Personality? We never find out about it. Same with his romantic interest. She’s the mayor of Dante’s Peak, is recently divorced, and has children. Personality? We never find out about it. The movie doesn’t seem to have much focus on developing these characters;it’s more putting these people in a volcanic disaster, seeing how some characters escape this destruction, and seeing how some perish.

In terms of scientific accuracy, the movie fares pretty well OVERALL. Now, again, there is some “Hollywood magic dust” sprinkled all over several scenes. For example, in one scene, the main characters drive their truck over recent, somewhat-hardened lava in order to get down the mountain, recently hardened lava! Lava is way too hot for any vehicle’s wheels to survive driving through it. In another scene, the grandmother, Ruth, dips herself into an “acid lake” to save her family. Several problems with this. First of all, while water can become acidic, acidic doesn’t automatically mean “melt your legs off”. The acidity level could’ve caused skin burns, but realistically, it would not have been THAT acidic. Even if it WAS that acidic, there’s a scene where Brosnan tries to paddle through the lake with his coat over his hand so his hand doesn’t burn. When the coat comes out of the water, it seems to be fine. If the lake was that acidic, that coat would not be toast.

Dante’s Peak has a distinct problem with developing its characters and story. Without this development the story just makes a meer “eh” and doesn’t hold any surprises, at least, not for me. The special effects are definitely something to look at, but without a strong story, and strong characters, the movie just sort of falls apart for me. Given this seems to be a common criticism with disaster movies for me, this movie serves as an example, at least for me, as to what can be done so wrong with the disaster genre.