PG-13 | 1h 44min | Drama | 1997
The director of Los Angeles’s Office of Emergency Management (OEM) Mike Roark (Tommy Lee Jones) cuts short a vacation with his daughter Kelly (Gaby Hoffmann), to investigate an earthquake. Subsequent fires kill a group of utility workers. Roark asks Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) chief Stan Olber (John Carroll Lynch) to halt nearby subway train lines. Olber refuses, ruling out danger. But seismologist Dr. Amy Barnes (Anne Heche) worries that quake-induced fault line fissures will unleash a volcanic eruption.
To stem the lava stream overground, Roark, Barnes, and LAPD Lt. Ed Fox (Keith David) have helicopters dump tons of water on lava that they’ve blockaded via hastily erected concrete-barriers. It works. Wet and cooled, the lava solidifies. But underground, the risk remains. If speeding lava escapes the tunnel, it’ll incinerate residential areas, including hospitals treating the injured. Cornered he may be, but Roark won’t give up.
The screenplay does feel unsubtle for grown-ups, especially in delivering otherwise wholesome messages about people from diverse backgrounds working together. It contains too many on-the-nose expositions and way too many subplots that don’t come together elegantly.
Still, for preteen audiences it’s an entertaining, uplifting story of creative, courageous collaboration in a crisis. Mick Jackson’s direction and Alan Silvestri’s score make you care about the characters and their motivations. Discussions about the science of quakes and magma are engaging rather than distracting, and rarely overwhelm the intensely human drama.
Collaboration in a Crisis
Jackson imagines a natural disaster in America’s second largest city four years before a terrorism-inspired disaster struck America’s largest. As real-world teams collaborated later in New York, here cinematic teams in Los Angeles collaborate, setting aside differences in age, sex, color and rank. They all work together—firefighters, doctors, nurses, paramedics, utility workers (roads, sewers, electricity, water), police corps, bomb squads, ambulance drivers, and helicopter pilots.They lend hope to those despairing, show courage when others feel fearful, and save lives when others are ready to give up. Jackson salutes unsung heroes in ways that few other disaster films do.
Roark represents the moral judgments involved when millions of lives hinge on one person’s decisions, especially one who’s weary and dying to be with his family. Opening credits text clarifies that in the event of an emergency or natural disaster, the OEM director has “power to control and command all the resources of the city.”
Given the “all” in that mandate, Jackson shows how a crisis elevates an otherwise unknown figure to gubernatorial stature. How crucial it is for those with such authority to be guided by a moral compass, not just technical expertise. Faced with constantly moving goalposts and less-than-comprehensive evidence, Roark meets his dilemma with a consultative style that’s also caring, creative, courageous, and committed.
Barnes says of the volcano, “all we can do is get out of its way.” But if that means Roark must tell everyone to “run for the hills and hide,” he “won’t do that.” The quake itself seems limited in impact. But when fires, a fault-line fissure, and hot-gas bursts point to a volcanic eruption, Roark must play to his team’s strengths and weaknesses, weighing risks against opportunities to save property and lives. Never mind that people are judging him all the while on what he decides, how well, and how quickly.
Young audiences need inspiring role models to understand what leadership is, and why only some are picked to lead, while the rest follow. Through that lens, this film is a gripping teach-in, if not a masterclass.
