Dante's Peak

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Dante's Peak

Film poster for Dante's Peak
Directed by Roger Donaldson
Produced by Gale Anne Hurd
Joseph Singer
Written by Leslie Bohem
Starring Pierce Brosnan
Linda Hamilton
Charles Hallahan
Jamie Renée Smith
Jeremy Foley
Grant Heslov
Cinematography Andrzej Bartkowiak
Distributed by Universal Pictures
Release date(s) February 7, 1997
Running time 109 min.
Language English
Budget $104,000,000 US (est.)
IMDb profile

Dante's Peak is a 1997 Disaster film starring Pierce Brosnan and Linda Hamilton. It portrays the effect of a volcano erupting in a small town in the Pacific Northwest portion of the United States. It was released a few months before Volcano and received wider success.[1] It has also been acclaimed for its relative scientific accuracy, which Volcano lacked.[2]

Contents

[edit] Cast

[edit] Plot

The film is set in the fictional town of Dante's Peak Park, Washington, located in the northern Cascade Mountains, but was actually filmed in and around Wallace in northern Idaho. The film is somewhat based on the real-life eruptions of Mount St. Helens in 1980 and Mount Pinatubo in 1991. The film is noted to have put emphasis on trying to accurately depict a volcanic eruption.[3] The film begins with the volcanic eruption of an unnamed volcano in Colombia (the script says this is Galeras, and the eruption is presumably the 1993 eruption which killed several volcanologists) where volcanologist Dr. Harry Dalton (Brosnan) attempts to evacuate with his fiancée Marianne. As they begin heading out of the town, large volcanic bombs begin to crash onto the small town, one of which penetrates the vehicle and kills Marianne.

Four years later, Harry is called in from vacation by his boss to investigate activity going on in the Northern Cascades region near the town of Dante's Peak. Meanwhile, a couple of backpackers went to the hot spring. A few minutes later, a small amount of volcanic activity had turned the hot spring sulfric, thus slowly chewing away and boiling the couple. At Dante's Peak, the town is receiving an award for being "The second most desirable place to live in the United States, population under 20,000" and celebrating its annual "Pioneer Days Festival". Harry meets with the town's mayor, Rachel Wando (Hamilton), who accompanies him with her two children, Graham (Foley) and Lauren (Smith), up to the mountain's "high lake" (high altitude lake located near the summit) to check the acidity in the water. After checking the acidity and picking up the mayor's ex-mother in law, Ruth (Hoffman), the five of them head to the town's hot springs where they discover the bodies of two dead backpackers, seared by the volcanic activity under the hot springs. Just before discovering the bodies, Graham attempts to make a dive into the springs since the they were hidden by steam, but in the nick of time Harry catches him and Lauren screams, thus revealing the bodies.

After evaluating the situation, Dalton calls a town meeting to discuss the option of putting the town on alert. As this occurs, Dalton's boss, Dr. Paul Dreyfus (Charles Hallahan) shows up to evaluate the mountain and goes against Dalton's decision for putting the town on alert based on an economically devastating decision made in 1980 when he put the towns around Mammoth Mountain on alert without the mountain blowing. Despite feeling strongly opposed to the decision, and being asked to leave, Dalton remains in the town to help Dreyfus and his USGS crew Greg, Terry, Nancy, and Stan (Heslov, Trutner, Field, and Ma) evaluate the possible eruption of the mountain. Initially, tests show no sign that the mountain will erupt, and after a week the crew begins to think about leaving the town. Over the same period, Dalton forms a bond with the mayor and her children, turning romantic as the plot progresses. After the town's water supply becomes sulfuric due to the acidity of the mountain breaching the town's springs, Dalton and Dreyfus then decide to put the town on alert and call for an evacuation. Mayor Wando attempts to get her ex-mother-in-law to come down but she refuses, preferring instead to stay at the bed and breakfast she and her husband built higher up in the mountain.

During the town meeting alerting the citizens to evacuate, the mountain begins to erupt, causing a stampede and a rush for the town's citizens to evacuate. Earthquakes cause the town and town's main highway to collapse and traffic jams clog the only other route out of town, causing chaos as citizens rush to escape.

Meanwhile, the mayor's children steal her car and drive it up the mountain to their grandmother's cabin in hopes of getting her to come down with them. When Dalton and Wando try to reach the children, they discover them to have left for the summit to bring down their grandmother. As the eruption continues, the USGS crew prepares to depart the town and both Dalton and Wando head up the mountain after the children, only to find the grandmother still refusing to leave her home. Meanwhile, the grandmother's dog has run out of the house and into the woods. Down in the town, the mountain has expelled large amounts of ash and most residents have been killed or have escaped. The National Guard shows up to aid in the evacuation as news crews begin to set up camp at a safe distance to cover the mountain's eruption.

Up the mountain, Dalton and Wando reach the bed and breakfast but don't initially find the children or their grandmother; after a few minutes of frantic searching they find them outside nearby, looking for the dog, and all make their way into the house where Ruth tells them to leave her alone and go back to the town. As they argue for her to come with them, a lava flow engulfs all three cars and parts of the house. The five of them flee to the nearby lake and take a metal boat across the river, leaving the dog behind. As they trek across, they realize that the lake has been turned to sulfuric acid and is eating through the metal boat. To keep the kids from panicking, Harry begins to sing, hoping that the boat will make it across, but as they near the other end of the lake, the boat's motor fails, the propeller blades were eaten by the acid. Before it reaches the shore, the boat begins to sink and Ruth jumps off to pull it along to the pier before it sinks, though doing so causes her to suffer injuries from the lake's acidity. She wades through the acidic water screaming, but dragging the boat along to try and save the rest of them. After evaluating her injuries, the five of them continue down the mountain with Dalton carrying Ruth on his back.

Back in the town, the USGS crew, the last ones left in the town, are evacuated by the military, but a lahar (volcanic-caused mudslide) causes the small bridge to begin to break apart as they reach it. Both military vehicles, carrying the majority of people in the party, make it across, but the one USGS vehicle, driven by Dreyfus, does not make it and Dreyfus is tragically killed as the bridge is washed away. Up the mountain, Ruth asks to be put down and after a talk with the children, she dies and her body is left there as the other four continue down the mountain. At a ranger station, they hotwire a truck and use it to continue down the mountain. While doing so, they encounter a lava flow that has blocked the route; the lava has mostly cooled on top but parts of it are still visibly simmering. As they manage to cross, they encounter and rescue the grandmother's dog who evidently circled the lake in the woods but became trapped on a rock surrounded by the lava flow.

Continuing down to the town, they discover the washed-out bridge. Realizing that they have no other means of leaving the town, Dalton heads back to the USGS makeshift operations center and picks up a tracking device from NASA that had been showcased in an earlier segment and notices that computers are signaling that the mountain is about to blow completely. Heading back to the truck he begins to head towards the town's mines as the mountain's top blows and a giant pyroclastic cloud engulfs the town. The truck makes it safely into the mine; the town is destroyed, to the USGS crew's dismay, as they believe Harry has been killed. Inside the mine, Graham leads the way, as most of the abandoned mines serve as a hideout for he and his friends, and shows the survivors all of his supplies. Remembering that he left the GTD in the truck, Harry leaves to activate it. Harry reaches the truck, but there is a cave-in and Harry is injured and trapped inside the truck. The situation keeps getting worse as Harry's arm is broken by falling rocks and he has to reach the tracking device without causing a fatal cave-in. Eventually he reaches it and activates it. The device flashes for "one or two days" before the four are rescued from the mine.

After being rescued from the mine by a huge team, Harry meets the rest of his crew who tell him that Dreyfus didn't make it and that "he got to see the show". Wando and her children are escorted out of the mine followed by applause from the rescue team for their survival. On board a helicopter, Graham asks Harry if he really meant what he said in the mine about taking the family fishing and Harry confirms it with the words, "Sure did." He and Rachel clasp hands and kiss and Harry tells the helicopter pilot that they are ready to go. As the helicopter flies into the distance over the ruins of Dante's Peak, the camera turns to the volcano, and the tense theme music suggests that it may erupt again at some point in the future.


[edit] See also

[edit] References

  1. ^ It's a Blow-out. Entertainment Weekly (January 17, 1997). Retrieved on 2007-10-14.
  2. ^ Volcano. The Austin Chronicle (April 25, 1997). Retrieved on 2007-03-07.
  3. ^ A Geological Guidebook to Dante's Peak. Retrieved on 2007-10-14.

[edit] External links