Sure, you can outrun a tsunami...
Disaster movies follow a certain formula. There is the perfunctory introduction of characters who are written in broad strokes to make it easy for the audience to identify the heroes, the survivors and the doomed. Amongst these will be a family man, spurred onto heroic deeds by a limited imagination that reduces an existential threat to humanity as an imminent threat to his own loved ones. His family has usually already been torn apart by his own lack of attention to it; it’s as though he don’t know what he’s got til it’s gone (and even fails to notice that it’s gone). There’s a expert of some sort who provides exposition as to the nature and potential destructiveness of the looming disaster with some pseudo-scientific jargon that rarely seems plausible. Comic relief usually comes in the form of a bumbling character who always seems to survive in spite of making some fairly risky choices (to say their survival is against the odds is not just cliche, but a redundancy – everything in these films is against the odds).
Plot exposition is as superficial as the introduction of characters, and these two facets are rarely integrated. Disaster movie scripts zoom through this phase because – let’s face it – we’re paying for the destruction, not the human insight. That’s what makes disaster flicks such good big-screen-bucket-of-popcorn viewing. On DVD, they are the kinds of films you can happily rent for a Sunday night, knowing that you won’t be agonising over the meaning at work the next day.
