Yesterday's Movies

Before watching the movie:

I didn’t know this movie existed before I decided I wanted to collect some disaster movies. It’s about a volcano erupting under Los Angeles. Tommy Lee Jones is in it. I don’t really know anything else, so I have nothing to say and I’m basically going in cold. Saying anything else would be padding out this section to try to get it closer to the height of the movie poster, which is just not going to happen this week because I have nothing else to say.

After watching the movie:

A pretty routine earthquake above a 4 on the Richter scale hits Los Angeles one morning, and even though he promised his daughter Kelly that he was taking his week with her off, and there was no major damage, Mike Roark springs into action as director of the LA Office of Emergency Management. Later that day, seven utility workers are burned to death in in a MacArthur Park storm drain, though there is debate over whether this was caused by the quake. Mike suggests that the subway lines near the epicenter should be suspended, but the MTA chairman thinks angry commuters are a bigger risk than any effect on the trains. Dr. Amy Barnes, a seismologist, suspects this could be a new volcano, but doesn’t have enough evidence yet to be sure enough for Mike to act on the idea. The next day a much bigger earthquake hits, derailing a subway train and knocking out power across the city. Mike takes Kelly out on the power outage call, and then the La Brea Tar Pits erupt, and lava starts to flow down Wilshire Boulevard. Kelly’s leg gets burned by a lava bomb and Dr. Jaye Calder, an ER doctor who happens to be on the scene, takes her and other injured people to Cedars-Sinai while Mike works to contain the eruption and keep his city safe.

What I’m most struck by in this movie is how local it is to Los Angeles. Everything has a very specific location to a degree that’s still unusual for the sheer bulk of LA-set movies that already taught me a lot about LA’s geography (a city I have only been to once, which is one more time than I’ve been to New York City, which I’m even more familiar with thanks to how many things are set there). The hyper-locality of the movie offsets the “only LA and NYC matter, apparently” eye roll that often accompanies the choice to set stories in those places. I can possibly even mostly let slide that a major inspiration was an eruption in Mexico but the story just had to be told in California.

At first it seemed like the story was going to be more of a widespread ensemble with Mike, Dr. Barnes, and Dr. Calder all being roughly coequal heroes in different places, but Dr. Calder was basically sidelined running Cedars-Sinai’s emergency response and soon thereafter, Dr. Barnes spent most of the movie as Mike’s sidekick who explains volcano concepts to him. The only core character having a really independent subplot in the second act is, surprisingly, Kelly. She gets fixed up pretty quickly at the hospital and gets charged with taking care of a young boy who got separated from his mother. There are other side plots with smaller acts of heroism, but these are pretty disconnected from the main plot with Mike and team fighting to contain the disaster.

The idea of the Office of Emergency Management seemed pretty unrealistic to me but I was willing to go with it as a device to have a hero who has unquestioned emergency command of all city resources but isn’t a political official or anywhere as critical to keep out of harm’s way as the mayor. That’s a hard thing to justify and not all movies can get away with the fight coming to the leader as in things like Air Force One. It turns out that emergency management agencies are common enough to have a Wikipedia page for the concept. However, I suspect they took some creative leaps considering LA’s such body has a slightly different name.

This is a really fun movie. It’s loaded with very familiar tropes but they play together into a fun ride with the relatively novel urban volcano concept. I feel like I’ve been to Los Angeles in a way a lot of LA based movies don’t elicit, which makes the stakes that much higher than just another metropolis getting torn apart. It’s not high cinema, but it’s a good time.