Volcano Pt 1
Athene
Rise for the Shadow Queen
- Location
- Dream of The 90s
- Pronouns
- She/Her
Volcano is a disaster movie set in the universe of As Seen On TV infomercials. A universe where people stumble their flesh golem bodies around from injury to injury. Eating, drinking and gravity are strange and dangerous concepts. A four year old can tell you what lava is in our reality, and could look at and identify a Volcano. In this reality however, the head of the office of emergency management for LA has never heard of "Magma" or "Geological Activity". Journalists seeing a lava flow struggle for words to describe this indescribable phenom. Its like some sort of LIQUID HOT ROCK THAT MOVES.
Tommy Lee Jones plays Mike Roarke, a man that gets an erection when a tornado hits a trailer park. Emergency management is passions 1 through 9 for him, which is why he's divorced. Also why he's divorced is that when a minor, almost damageless earthquake hits, he ditches his daughter to go poke at it with a stick. He moved from the midwest to LA to sate his disaster boner. He's the aforementioned person that doesn't know what a geological event is. Don't worry though, he's smarter than the actual experts. Said experts are played by Anne "Literally the Devil" Heche and "Who even cares because she's dead almost immediately".
I'm getting ahead of myself though! I need to introduce all the myriad sub plots that any disaster movie requires. First, there's the asian doctor, who's character is that she is both asian and a doctor. Her husband, Chris in the Morning to anyone old as fuck like me, has a building that only exists to be foreshadowing. He wants her to move to a different hospital because his job is to be a jerk. He mostly isn't in the movie. There is also the MTA guys who are extending the subway and their supervisor who exists and is a thing, with his sole character trait being that he's quitting smoking. They don't like Roarke. That's about it.
Next is the tensions between black people and the police, introduced via two white guys who got into a fender bender having to hide in a church until rescued by police. The police officers are kind of jerks? The movie apparently thinks it has a few things to say about the issue, because of course it does. It will get immensely painful about it.
There's Roarke's daughter who has come into town for visitation that thinks she's some kind of person with agency and desires. She wants a tattoo. Don't worry, she's useless luggage and will be reduced to holding her teddy bear in terror later. Roarke frequently abandons her. Roarke himself has a subordinate played by Dan Cheadle whose sole character trait is he wants his bosses job and handles all the things he's supposed to do. This is because Roarke also abandons his actual job which is to coordinate things and pokes around in the field all the time.
The movie begins in earnest when some public works guys get roasted while working on a tunnel near MacArthur Park, after an earthquake earlier in the day. Everyone dismisses it as steam but well, its obviously not. Roarke abandons his daughter at home and goes to poke at it with a stick with his best bud Frank Griga, sorry, "Gator". They're forced to bail when all their shit starts melting. The USGS then sends two geologists, Deady Mcgonnadie and Anne Heche. They point out that the temperature of the lake has gone up 9 degrees in a matter of hours. They then have to explain what geology is to a man whose job it is to handle earthquakes. What are the qualifications for this job? I keep stressing this because this is like if you were watching Twister and they had to explain "clouds" and "wind" to the storm chasers. Its like if they had to explain what "water" and "fire" was to the firefighters in Towering Inferno. This is like if they had to explain "Oxygen" and "Space" and "NASA" in Apollo 13. Are we sure that he actually works there and isn't some lunatic that broke into the building and everyone is too afraid to tell him he doesn't work there?
With his newfound knowledge of "plates", he puts a ban on their thinky smarty stuff because I dunno, the fault line can smell menstruation? They mock his sexist patronizing of course. The one who isn't Anne Heche does an impression of him telling them its too dangerous for womenfolk to be down in holes in the ground and that they need a big strong man like him to protect them.
She's dead less than three minutes later.
An earthquake hits and Roarke's daughter is pelted with bookcases and assorted furniture. Why would the head of emergency management for LA secure his furniture? Are you going to let some /Swedes/ and their genderless pictograms boss you around?! Not in Roarke's America!
Fucking pinkos.
He throws her and her teddy bear into his car and tells her he's going to take her to his office, which is the safest place in town. They never arrive, as a volcanic eruption occurs in the LaBrea Tar- Wait, what?
You've spent 30 minutes building up a volcano eruption at MacArthur Park, then you zip 5 miles away to blow up the Tar Pits? What? MacArthur Park never really becomes all that important after this, so what on earth was the point? The only thing that happens at the literal plot hole is the one womans sudden but inevitable death. You have constructed poorly!
So, fire begins raining from the sky! The posters assure us that the coast is toast but the movie only takes place in an area 7 miles wide. The eruption blasts out windows and flips vehicles from waterpipes bursting with steam. A lava bomb smashes into a firetruck, flipping it. Roarke goes to help them but forgets about it, then his idiot daughter gets squirted with lava and flails uselessly. I guess the head of emergency management never taught his daughter to stop, drop, and\or roll. Roarke saves her as the lava begins to pour out of the volcano and remembers oh right, the trapped men. Does he save them? Do the other firetrucks filled with firefighters save their brothers in arms? Does literally anyone smash out a window and grab the guy? Let this maudlin beat be your answer:
OH THE HUMANITY!
Yeah so only one other dude goes to save them and he actually climbs inside, so they ded. The Lava begins flowing out on Wilshire, or as the news man watching it says: "The tar has caught on fire, melted, expanded and is flowing onto the street!" Its lava you dumb fuck. I knew what Lava was when it looked like this:
It's not like he's some lone fool though. Everyone in this movie is incredibly dumb. Two men were roasted alive by lava and their buddies were trying to put out structural fires in the face of holy shit, actual lava. Meanwhile a subway train below has derailed and the passengers are stuck, because the hydraulic doors won't open. The driver is up and about, and I hate to Monday morning quarterback, but you have a fucking door in the front that you can go out of. Its hinged. You have the key. A fucking crow could figure this shit out, because they possess problem solving! Ok, you aren't going to go through the obviously available door, so will you at least grab something and bust out a window so that people can escape? No? Ok, well fuck, better lay down and die.
Roarke by this point has abandoned his daughter to remain on scene and is sending her with the asian doctor who has been treating people on the scene, up to Cedar Sinai. Roarke in fact tells them to send everyone up to Ceders, because "its the safest place".
Fucking what? Yeah its further away than the other nearby hospital but holy shit, put people farther down range of the ACTUAL VOLCANO Roarke. The elephant in the room is that you are garbage at your job. You live in an area prone to earthquakes and you don't know fuck all about Earthquakes or the workings of the Earth. Your home is not earthquake proofed. You don't actually manage anything, you just run around in the field and yell ideas at people. We're supposed to believe that you are this incredible Emergency Manager when your subordinate does the work. Is Don Cheadle your Leslie Knope?! If you were the emergency guy for some area with no natural disasters and you blew your boss everyday, I could buy it. You work for LA county though. A place with serious face disasters. You are sending people less than two miles away from an active fucking volcano. What if the character of its eruption changes? I mean spoiler alert: It does and it almost wipes out that hospital.
But nobody would do that. He is literally unqualified for his job. 1.5 Miles?! The movie tries to act like its a good distance but you would be able to see the lava flow from the Hospital. This thing is spraying rocks and lava everywhere, are you some kind of fucking idiot? Do you think that Volcanos are stopped by gentrification? You're the guy that blew up that whale on the coast, aren't you Roarke? Did you later get a job with FEMA?
So anyway, it was a scary 6 minutes of having to be a parent but luckily he's abandoned his daughter and can focus on his true calling: Micromanaging first responders. There is a lot to go into but let me close off a plot cul-de-sac first.
The MTA boss has gone down to the subway train to rescue his people. There is Lava flowing through the tunnels. They manage to evacuate everyone from the train except for the driver and he goes back in for him. Unfortunately, the Lava has passed the entrance of the train by the time he gets back to the door. Why didn't they send multiple people in to be able to drag him out faster? Why didn't they pull people out back to front?
Shut up, this isn't a thinking movie.
His men tell him to leave him behind but he never leaves a man behind, its the Subway Code. You live by the turnstile, you die by the turnstile. He hoists the man up and jumps with everything he has.
I knew this scene was coming. I'd seen the movie before and while a number of scenes had escaped me, this one always stuck with me. Because its the dumbest shit and I love it. I turned around and I began taping my girlfriends as the rescue begins to capture their reaction. I will have to crop it quite a bit since one wasn't wearing clothes, but I have an amazing reaction video when I do. The scene is so narmy. So misguided. So illogical. It brings a smile to my face every time. The fact that the uploaded clip of it that I found is titled "A Hero's Sacrifice" makes me laugh by itself.
Presented without immediate commentary: A Hero's Sacrifice. My only request is that if you haven't seen the movie, please don't spoil yourself with other clips. Because I enjoy describing this movie.
Beautiful. PERFECTO!
Tommy Lee Jones plays Mike Roarke, a man that gets an erection when a tornado hits a trailer park. Emergency management is passions 1 through 9 for him, which is why he's divorced. Also why he's divorced is that when a minor, almost damageless earthquake hits, he ditches his daughter to go poke at it with a stick. He moved from the midwest to LA to sate his disaster boner. He's the aforementioned person that doesn't know what a geological event is. Don't worry though, he's smarter than the actual experts. Said experts are played by Anne "Literally the Devil" Heche and "Who even cares because she's dead almost immediately".
I'm getting ahead of myself though! I need to introduce all the myriad sub plots that any disaster movie requires. First, there's the asian doctor, who's character is that she is both asian and a doctor. Her husband, Chris in the Morning to anyone old as fuck like me, has a building that only exists to be foreshadowing. He wants her to move to a different hospital because his job is to be a jerk. He mostly isn't in the movie. There is also the MTA guys who are extending the subway and their supervisor who exists and is a thing, with his sole character trait being that he's quitting smoking. They don't like Roarke. That's about it.
Next is the tensions between black people and the police, introduced via two white guys who got into a fender bender having to hide in a church until rescued by police. The police officers are kind of jerks? The movie apparently thinks it has a few things to say about the issue, because of course it does. It will get immensely painful about it.
There's Roarke's daughter who has come into town for visitation that thinks she's some kind of person with agency and desires. She wants a tattoo. Don't worry, she's useless luggage and will be reduced to holding her teddy bear in terror later. Roarke frequently abandons her. Roarke himself has a subordinate played by Dan Cheadle whose sole character trait is he wants his bosses job and handles all the things he's supposed to do. This is because Roarke also abandons his actual job which is to coordinate things and pokes around in the field all the time.
The movie begins in earnest when some public works guys get roasted while working on a tunnel near MacArthur Park, after an earthquake earlier in the day. Everyone dismisses it as steam but well, its obviously not. Roarke abandons his daughter at home and goes to poke at it with a stick with his best bud Frank Griga, sorry, "Gator". They're forced to bail when all their shit starts melting. The USGS then sends two geologists, Deady Mcgonnadie and Anne Heche. They point out that the temperature of the lake has gone up 9 degrees in a matter of hours. They then have to explain what geology is to a man whose job it is to handle earthquakes. What are the qualifications for this job? I keep stressing this because this is like if you were watching Twister and they had to explain "clouds" and "wind" to the storm chasers. Its like if they had to explain what "water" and "fire" was to the firefighters in Towering Inferno. This is like if they had to explain "Oxygen" and "Space" and "NASA" in Apollo 13. Are we sure that he actually works there and isn't some lunatic that broke into the building and everyone is too afraid to tell him he doesn't work there?
With his newfound knowledge of "plates", he puts a ban on their thinky smarty stuff because I dunno, the fault line can smell menstruation? They mock his sexist patronizing of course. The one who isn't Anne Heche does an impression of him telling them its too dangerous for womenfolk to be down in holes in the ground and that they need a big strong man like him to protect them.
She's dead less than three minutes later.
An earthquake hits and Roarke's daughter is pelted with bookcases and assorted furniture. Why would the head of emergency management for LA secure his furniture? Are you going to let some /Swedes/ and their genderless pictograms boss you around?! Not in Roarke's America!
Fucking pinkos.
He throws her and her teddy bear into his car and tells her he's going to take her to his office, which is the safest place in town. They never arrive, as a volcanic eruption occurs in the LaBrea Tar- Wait, what?
You've spent 30 minutes building up a volcano eruption at MacArthur Park, then you zip 5 miles away to blow up the Tar Pits? What? MacArthur Park never really becomes all that important after this, so what on earth was the point? The only thing that happens at the literal plot hole is the one womans sudden but inevitable death. You have constructed poorly!
So, fire begins raining from the sky! The posters assure us that the coast is toast but the movie only takes place in an area 7 miles wide. The eruption blasts out windows and flips vehicles from waterpipes bursting with steam. A lava bomb smashes into a firetruck, flipping it. Roarke goes to help them but forgets about it, then his idiot daughter gets squirted with lava and flails uselessly. I guess the head of emergency management never taught his daughter to stop, drop, and\or roll. Roarke saves her as the lava begins to pour out of the volcano and remembers oh right, the trapped men. Does he save them? Do the other firetrucks filled with firefighters save their brothers in arms? Does literally anyone smash out a window and grab the guy? Let this maudlin beat be your answer:
OH THE HUMANITY!
Yeah so only one other dude goes to save them and he actually climbs inside, so they ded. The Lava begins flowing out on Wilshire, or as the news man watching it says: "The tar has caught on fire, melted, expanded and is flowing onto the street!" Its lava you dumb fuck. I knew what Lava was when it looked like this:
It's not like he's some lone fool though. Everyone in this movie is incredibly dumb. Two men were roasted alive by lava and their buddies were trying to put out structural fires in the face of holy shit, actual lava. Meanwhile a subway train below has derailed and the passengers are stuck, because the hydraulic doors won't open. The driver is up and about, and I hate to Monday morning quarterback, but you have a fucking door in the front that you can go out of. Its hinged. You have the key. A fucking crow could figure this shit out, because they possess problem solving! Ok, you aren't going to go through the obviously available door, so will you at least grab something and bust out a window so that people can escape? No? Ok, well fuck, better lay down and die.
Roarke by this point has abandoned his daughter to remain on scene and is sending her with the asian doctor who has been treating people on the scene, up to Cedar Sinai. Roarke in fact tells them to send everyone up to Ceders, because "its the safest place".
Fucking what? Yeah its further away than the other nearby hospital but holy shit, put people farther down range of the ACTUAL VOLCANO Roarke. The elephant in the room is that you are garbage at your job. You live in an area prone to earthquakes and you don't know fuck all about Earthquakes or the workings of the Earth. Your home is not earthquake proofed. You don't actually manage anything, you just run around in the field and yell ideas at people. We're supposed to believe that you are this incredible Emergency Manager when your subordinate does the work. Is Don Cheadle your Leslie Knope?! If you were the emergency guy for some area with no natural disasters and you blew your boss everyday, I could buy it. You work for LA county though. A place with serious face disasters. You are sending people less than two miles away from an active fucking volcano. What if the character of its eruption changes? I mean spoiler alert: It does and it almost wipes out that hospital.
But nobody would do that. He is literally unqualified for his job. 1.5 Miles?! The movie tries to act like its a good distance but you would be able to see the lava flow from the Hospital. This thing is spraying rocks and lava everywhere, are you some kind of fucking idiot? Do you think that Volcanos are stopped by gentrification? You're the guy that blew up that whale on the coast, aren't you Roarke? Did you later get a job with FEMA?
So anyway, it was a scary 6 minutes of having to be a parent but luckily he's abandoned his daughter and can focus on his true calling: Micromanaging first responders. There is a lot to go into but let me close off a plot cul-de-sac first.
The MTA boss has gone down to the subway train to rescue his people. There is Lava flowing through the tunnels. They manage to evacuate everyone from the train except for the driver and he goes back in for him. Unfortunately, the Lava has passed the entrance of the train by the time he gets back to the door. Why didn't they send multiple people in to be able to drag him out faster? Why didn't they pull people out back to front?
Shut up, this isn't a thinking movie.
His men tell him to leave him behind but he never leaves a man behind, its the Subway Code. You live by the turnstile, you die by the turnstile. He hoists the man up and jumps with everything he has.
I knew this scene was coming. I'd seen the movie before and while a number of scenes had escaped me, this one always stuck with me. Because its the dumbest shit and I love it. I turned around and I began taping my girlfriends as the rescue begins to capture their reaction. I will have to crop it quite a bit since one wasn't wearing clothes, but I have an amazing reaction video when I do. The scene is so narmy. So misguided. So illogical. It brings a smile to my face every time. The fact that the uploaded clip of it that I found is titled "A Hero's Sacrifice" makes me laugh by itself.
Presented without immediate commentary: A Hero's Sacrifice. My only request is that if you haven't seen the movie, please don't spoil yourself with other clips. Because I enjoy describing this movie.
Beautiful. PERFECTO!
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