| Roguish tidal waves, inclement blizzards – these are just some of the natural catastrophes movies like to depict as we see an increase in people’s desire to see – and be awestruck – by Gaia’s cranky side. But are these movies unfairly sullying Mother Nature’s reputation?
Nothing makes greater popcorn entertainment than a disaster flick showing a cantankerous and contemptuous Mother Nature. Call it a case of schadenfreude, or just a perverse penchant for destruction if you wish, but there is no denying that disaster movies are a whole lot of fun to watch.
From the globally-scaled (think The Day After Tomorrow and its maniacal destruction) to the more localised (Poseidon and its 150-foot tall freak wave), natural disasters have never looked more insidious. But as you gleefully witness all this destruction unravel before you, have you ever wondered whether such calamities would actually occur in real life?
It is easy to dismiss such on-screen catastrophes as, well, just on-screen catastrophes, with little or no vestige of realism in them. Movie producers, after all, are after our money, and knowing our predilection for visual and audio razzmatazz, the more destructive and larger-than-life the natural disasters are, the better. So when someone suggests that we might have multiple tornadoes running amok simultaneously a là Twister (1996), we would scoff and laugh at the person’s naivété, but – upon further research – at our own risk.
It turns out that disaster movies, like the aforementioned Twister, have their roots (some of them at least) in reality. Tornado outbreaks, like those depicted in Twister, are actually quite commonplace in North America. Asia, too, is not spared from the ire of tornadoes with Vietnam having experienced a tornado outbreak as recent as 2000, killing 1 and injuring 77 others. Dante’s Peak (1997), a movie about the plight of a small town perched on an active volcano, also bears much resemblance to real-life occurences. The real main star of the movie – the eponymous volcano, and its subsequent eruption, were portrayed in graphic details, but at no expense to scientific accuracy.
What about The Day After Tomorrow (2004), in which global warming causes the half the world to freeze into wintry ice? Surely humanity is not doomed to such a morbid fate? Thankfully this refrigerating of our northern hemisphere is but part of a scriptwriter’s vivid imagination, and we should not, in any case, expect to go sledding in Kuwait anytime soon. A more likely corollary of global warming would be the melting of our polar caps and hence increased water levels, which was ominously captured in the 1995 flop Waterworld. The movie went a wee bit overboard, depicting a world totally submerged in water, and even introducing a new breed of humans – fishmen - who sport gills and webbed hands.
Nevertheless, the point remains that all disaster movies, like most movies, mix fact with fiction in varying degrees. Dante’s Peak, for all its veracious story-telling, was also guilty of misrepresenting certain scientific details. The titular volcano, supposedly a Cascade volcano, was portrayed in the movie to expel runny, fluid lava. However, the lava that erupts from a Cascade volcano, in actual fact, should be viscous and slow-moving – but that would make the lava a whole lot more innocuous, and the movie wouldn’t be as exciting now would it?
What these movies truly have in common is that, by tweaking certain scientific truths, they all portray nature as a potent destructive force, wrecking havoc on humanity with callous indifference. But why this unflattering portrayal? For one, showing the overwhelming devastation meted out by nature can attract viewers who are keen on the special visual and audio effects. Another reason could be how people are growing increasingly fascinated with nature and its inimical side. With environmental concerns such as global warming coming to the forefront in recent years, coupled with frequent occurrences of natural disasters around the globe - from Hurricane Katrina, Cyclone Nargis to the Sichuan earthquake - people are becoming more interested in nature’s destructiveness and such disaster movies pander to this indulgence.
It is extremely erroneous to consistently cast such a bad – and often inaccurate - light on nature. This also extends to anthropomorphisms such as Mother Nature and Gaia, which paradoxically appear to connote a warm, loving quality. Sadly, production companies, with their profit-driven motives, simply produce movies that make them money and are totally unconcerned with the way they portray nature. If there were a wave of change tilting people’s preferences for movies that portray nature favourably, production companies would respond by churning out nature-friendly movies. Alas, that would be an improbably scenario as people’s preferences, in this case, are unlikely to change. A disaster flick simply offers much more excitement and drama and if one wanted to watch a celebration of nature, Discovery Channel would suffice.
So, it seems that disaster movies, and its hyperbolic depiction of a baleful nature, are here to stay. Now, the best we can hope for is that such movies practise more common sense, and not have more far-fetched plots than they already do. Half the globe frozen into ice is, though barely, still believable. But really, fish-men? E
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