Fridae

I count the disaster movie as one of my top cinematic guilty pleasures, but it’s one that I’ll readily admit to – only because it’s everyone’s cinematic guilty pleasure too. Centuries before movies were even invented, mankind already made the concept of the disaster movie. Ask the Sumerians about the great deluge in the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Abrahamic faiths about the Flood, the Chinese about Nüwa and the mending of the heavens, and you’ll find that we already perfected the disaster movie into an art form.

You see, way before Shakespeare, our bards have turned the disaster movie (or disaster epic, if you will) into the most human of dramas. Faced with an account of an improbable and impossible apocalypse, one feels pity for the doomed as they face their fate, scorn for the damned as they lie, cheat, steal and kill for higher ground, schadenfreude for the naysayers and apocalypse-deniers, anger for the cynical politicians putting their interests above others, and elation for the everyman survivors. And of course, fear for the onrushing disaster.

Strangely enough, mastery of the disaster movie is unseen outside of Japan. Roland Emmerich’s attempt touches base with the concept of the disaster movie, the logistics and CGI of a disaster movie, but remains hit and miss (and occasionally, completely tone deaf) with the human drama.

The director seems to place far more emphasis into the CGI aspect, presenting us with several variations of the “Man outruns X” formula, several takes on buildings collapsing faster than the Twin Towers, and the general carnage associated with the end of days.

Watch this for the effects, the loud explosions, and the ridiculousness of it all.

Vernon Chan has been a movie reviewer since 2006, and curated the Toronto Singapore Film Festival in 2007 and 2008. His film blog is at apersistentvision.blogspot.com.