Dante's Peak, Twister.
Last night, in the spirit of extreme boredom I watched "Dante's Peak". Then, as if I hadn't gotten enough disaster, I watched "Twister".Dante's Peak was an ... okay movie bordering on Not Very Good A'tall. It seemed as though it was trying to do too many things at once. "Hey, lets have an earthquake AND a romance AND a grandmother who is too stubborn to come off her mountain because it is her mountain and she built the house with her own two hands damnit and holy cow, I smell self-sacrifice." Plus, never mind that the dog appeared to have survived even though he was surrounded by super hot lava on either side of him.
THEN, there is the problem of the super quick, super wrapped up ending. It seemed that, even though the movie was about a volcano eruption (and one would think that would allow for lots of interesting material) there wasn't a lot happening in the movie. Everything starts very small and slow, then the eruption hits, people go crazy nuts, but ... I found there was nothing much to keep interest, that everything was just a little too cut and dried. (Although the claustrophobic car-with-rocks-on-top scene was pretty suspenseful -- but they didn't really GO anywhere with that.)
Secondly, "Twister". This is one of the only films I can stand Helen Hunt in. And even then. Plus there is a scene when Bill Paxton says, "Show me" and I fully expected an elderly woman from the Titanic to be standing in front of him ready to tell her story of the Heart of the Ocean. But that just be because I watched that movie WAY too many times when I was fifteen. (I'm not proud.)
Mostly Twister reminds me of when I lived in Saskatoon and all I really wanted was for there to be a tornado, so we could hide out in the basement and light candles and have "an adventure". Of course, when there actually was a tornado it occurred a few weeks after we moved back to Ontario.
Dante's Peak: **
Twister: ***