The Queue: Ride Out the Storm With These On-Demand Disaster Movies
As you may be aware, a monster blizzard is threatening to blanket the East Coast in snow this weekend. The National Weather Service is forecasting up to two feet in some locations, with wind gusts topping 50 mph.
It’s the latest in a series of heavy weather incidents that have put the country on edge. When the weather outside is frightful, it’s time for movie night at home, I always say.
In the thematic spirit, we recommend five natural-disaster movies you can get on-demand, via various modes of digital distribution. Unfortunately, none of the good weather-related disaster movies are currently in the streaming subscription bins at Netflix, Hulu, or Amazon Prime. So we’ve provided links for digital rental or purchase through iTunes and Amazon Video. Also be sure to check on-demand offerings through your cable, satellite, or game-console network.
The Day After Tomorrow (2004)
When selecting a good disaster movie, put a premium on spectacle — big visuals, big sound, big effects budget. That’s why you don’t see a lot of small indie disaster movies. (Although there are some good ones.)
The Day After Tomorrow is a 21st-century take on the classic disaster movies of the 1970s, with mounds of catastrophic eye candy piled on top. In the film, climate change has triggered massive hemisphere-spanning storms and a subsequent planetary freeze. The big-budget special effects still pack a wallop, 10 years later.
Twister (1996)
Let’s be frank: Twister is not a good movie. But then it was never intended to be. This super-tornado disaster drama from the summer of 1996 is little more than a sequence of special-effects showcases, stitched together with Bill Paxton, Helen Hunt, and a goofy B-movie script.
The upside is, now that it has aged properly, Twister can be appreciated with a degree of ironic removal — like The Towering Inferno or The Poseidon Adventure. Enjoy the campy dialogue, but pay attention to those ominous images of mean skies and massive tornadoes. They’re deployed with real skill and are designed to hit you right in the brain stem. As a species, we’ve been scared of this stuff for a long, long time.
The Perfect Storm (2000)
Based on a true story, The Perfect Storm is another good excuse to surrender your critical faculties and binge on spectacle. George Clooney and Mark Wahlberg headline as Gloucester, Mass., hard guys on a commercial fishing boat that finds itself in the wrongest of places at the wrongest of times.
The film’s skillful mix of practical and digital effects results in some of the best heavy-weather sequences ever put to film. And the movie’s climactic money shot — featuring the mother of all rogue waves — is still a doozy.
An Inconvenient Truth (2006)
If you really want to scare yourself with a natural-disaster movie, look no further than An Inconvenient Truth, the 2006 Oscar winner for Best Documentary. The film famously documents the traveling multimedia presentation given by former Vice President Al Gore on the dangers of global warming and anthropogenic climate change.
Director Davis Guggenheim is among the planet’s leading experts at structuring this kind of issue-oriented documentary film. It’s amazing how much information a skilled filmmaker can pack into two hours. You get plenty of images of scary storms and weather too. An Inconvenient Truth plays like a vérité disaster movie in slow motion, with special effects replaced by raw footage and infographics.
Pompeii (2014)
For a disaster-movie curveball selection, consider this modest little offering from 2014. What’s fun about Pompeii is that it’s actually two movies in one. The first half is a kind of Gladiator-lite story of swords and sandals in ancient Rome, starring Kiefer Sutherland, Carrie-Anne Moss, and Game of Thrones hunk Kit Harington.
Then everything goes abruptly bananas with the infamous eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 A.D. The film switches into a historical disaster movie as the village of Pompeii is buried in flaming boulders and burning ash. Volcanic eruptions may be low on our collective list of natural-disaster anxieties, but it doesn’t hurt to be prepared.
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Glenn McDonald writes about the intersections of technology and culture at glenn-mcdonald.com and via Twitter @glennmcdonald1.
