Dante's Peak


Dante's Peak is a 1997 American disaster thriller film directed by Roger Donaldson. Starring Pierce Brosnan, Linda Hamilton, Charles Hallahan, Elizabeth Hoffman, Jamie Renée Smith, Jeremy Foley, and Grant Heslov, the film is set in the fictional town of Dante's Peak where the inhabitants fight to survive a volcanic eruption from a long dormant stratovolcano that has suddenly woken up and the danger soon escalates. The film was released on February 7, 1997, under the production of Universal Pictures and Pacific Western Productions. Despite mostly negative reviews, it was a box office success and has since gained a cult following among disaster film aficionados.

Plot

and geologist Dr. Harry Dalton and his lover, Marianne, witness an eruption in Colombia. As they try to escape, a piece of debris pierces through the roof of Harry's truck, killing Marianne.
Four years later, Harry is assigned by his boss, Dr. Paul Dreyfus, to investigate seismic activity near Dante's Peak, a small town in Washington near a dormant stratovolcano. There, Harry meets Mayor Rachel Wando, along with her children, Graham and Lauren.
Rachel offers to take Harry with them as they see her estranged ex-mother-in-law, Ruth, who lives near a lake at the base of the volcano. While exploring, they witness various calamities, including a young couple boiled to death in a hot spring pool. Paul arrives with a USGS team that evening, and they set up a base to monitor the volcano. Harry believes that the disturbances to be signs of an impending eruption, but Paul disagrees and advises against giving a false alarm. Still, Harry partially convinces Rachel to prepare for a disaster, while developing a relationship with her and the children.
A few days later, Harry and his colleague, Terry, go to the volcano's summit crater to obtain further evidence, but a rock slide traps Terry, and Harry goes down to help him. A chopper escorts the two to safety as the volcano opens up. In the aftermath, Terry has suffered a broken leg, while Harry and Paul argue, as Paul denies evidence that such danger is imminent, and the USGS team eventually begins preparing to leave. When Harry goes to say goodbye to Rachel, they discover that the town's water supply has been contaminated by sulfur dioxide, and the next morning, seismic readings and gas levels rise dramatically.
Finally convinced that the volcano will eventually erupt, and with the National Guard unavailable until the next day, Paul gives Harry permission to put the town on alert. During a town meeting taking place at the high school, an earthquake strikes, sending the townsfolk into a panicking frenzy. As the volcano erupts, Harry and Rachel go to retrieve the children, but find a letter explaining that they went to get Ruth, who previously refused to leave her home.
Minutes after they reach Ruth and the children, a lava flow engulfs Ruth's cabin and destroys the vehicles. The five flee across the lake in a motorboat, but the lake has become acidic due to sulfur-rich gases from the volcano, destroying the motor and eating away at the boat. Ruth jumps out of the boat to help it to shore, but sustains severe chemical burns, and by next morning, she dies of her injuries.
Meanwhile, the heat from the volcano has melted the glaciers on the peak, forming a lahar that collapses a dam on the river leading into town. At the same time, Harry and the Wandos ride an abandoned ranger's truck and set off back to town, where the National Guard is helping evacuate the remaining survivors. The lahar strikes a bridge as the USGS team is driving across. The team makes it, but Paul does not, and is thrown off the bridge to his death. Meanwhile, Harry and the Wandos cross over a rough terrain with hardened lava, and they rescue Ruth's dog, Roughy, just in time before another lava flow catches up.
When they arrive back at the deserted town, Harry retrieves an extremely low frequency distress radiobeacon by NASA that was removed from a robot known as Spiderlegs earlier, but learns that the volcano is due for one final eruption. As he and the Wandos begin to leave, the volcano makes its final eruption, releasing a pyroclastic cloud that simply obliterates everything in its path. With no way out of town, Harry and the Wandos narrowly make it to an abandoned mine that Graham and his friends had been using as a hideout earlier. Witnessing the eruption from afar, the USGS team presume Harry and the Wandos to be dead.
Inside the mine, Harry forgets the beacon in the truck and goes back for it. Rock slides separate Harry and the Wandos, partially caving the mine in, and Harry suffers a broken arm in the process. Despite his injuries, he still manages to activate the beacon.
By nighttime, Terry notices that the beacon has been activated, and the USGS dispatches search and rescue teams. Harry and the Wandos are freed from the mine, reunited with Harry's team, learn of Paul's death, and are airlifted out by helicopter. As the credits roll, the camera pans over the obliterated town before turning to the volcano, now reduced to a Mount St. Helens-like caldera.

Cast

Production

began on May 6, 1996. The film was shot on location in Wallace, Idaho.
Exterior shots of the Point Dume Post Office in Malibu, California, were used as the USGS's David A. Johnston Cascades Volcano Observatory headquarters in Vancouver, Washington. The facility was named in honor of David A. Johnston, a young scientist who had precisely predicted the volatility of the May 18, 1980, Mount St. Helens eruption and perished during the event.
The scene involving the geological robot and the trapped scientist was shot inside the crater of Mount St. Helens, as evidenced by a brief appearance of Mount Adams, a dormant peak east of Mount St. Helens, as the film focuses on the scientists. The scene itself was actually filmed on the tarmac of Van Nuys Airport, while the Mount Adams image was composited in later. Production was completed on August 31, 1996.
Extensive special effects surrounding certain aspects of the film, such as the lava and pyroclastic flows, were created by Digital Domain, Banned from the Ranch Entertainment, and CIS Hollywood. The computer-generated imagery was mostly coordinated and supervised by Patrick McClung, Roy Arbogast, Lori J. Nelson, Richard Stutsman, and Dean Miller. Although the film uses considerable amounts of CGI, the volcanic ash in the film was created using cellulose insulation manufactured by Regal Industries in Crothersville, Indiana. Between visuals, miniatures, and animation, over 300 technicians were directly involved in the production aspects of the special effects.
Despite the complexity of its visual effects, Dante's Peak was not nominated for an Academy Award for Best Visual Effects that year, as it faced stiff competition from , Starship Troopers, and Titanic, the eventual winner of the award.

Locations

The original score was co-composed by John Frizzell and James Newton Howard. Howard wrote the main theme and a number of cues, while Frizzell wrote the bulk of the score.
Thirty minutes of the score was released by Varèse Sarabande; the short album length being due to high orchestra fees at the time of release. An expanded bootleg exists that contains almost the entire score.
The contents of the CD release can also be found on the region 1 DVD, and Blu-ray on an alternate audio track during the 'Creating a Volcano' documentary.
The "Main Titles" cue is also featured on Varèse's The Towering Inferno and Other Disaster Classics compilation album.

Reception

Box office

The film was released on February 7, 1997 in 2,657 theatres. It debuted at #2 at the box office behind the special edition re-release of Star Wars; it took in $18 million in its opening weekend. After eight weeks in theatres, it had grossed $67.1 million in the United States and $111.0 million overseas, for a total of $178 million worldwide.

Critical reception

Although it was a bigger financial success than Volcano, Dante's Peak received mostly negative reviews compared to the generally mixed reviews of its rival. Rotten Tomatoes gave the film a 26% rating based on 31 reviews, compared to a 50% rating from 46 reviews for Volcano. The consensus states: "Dante's Peak works when things are on fire, but everything else from dialogue to characters is scathingly bad."
Two professors at the Lewis-Clark State College reviewed the movie, noting some aspects such as the pyroclastic clouds, were realistic, and others less so. They also panned the movie for understating the negative effects of a possible false alarm.