Twister, Armageddon … Back to 5 major catastrophe films from the 1990s
Before leaving to hunt the tornadoes this evening on W9, here is a selection of some of the best disaster films of this decade.
THE Twist of Jan de Bontreleased in 1996, will return this evening at 9:10 p.m. An opportunity for First to come back to nineties And their penchant for disasters of all kinds in an anthology (non-exhaustive and chronological) of the nuggets, popular and less popular of this sub-genre of action, which has seen more than the seven wounds of Egypt S ‘ shoot on our world.
Since then, the film has had a sequel, Twisterswith in particular Glen Powell, who also had breath.
Alert !Wolfgang Petersen (1995)
Wolfgang Petersen accomplished Alert ! (Outbreak in English) two years before Air Force weE and infuses the same casting effort. Dustin Hoffman,, Rene Russo,, Morgan Freeman,, Kevin Spacey,, Donald Sutherland And Cuba Gooding Jr. are replied in this film with the invisible threat, of which we will find the issues in the Contagion of Steven Soderbergh A few fifteen years later. While a lightning virus (Motaba, worse than Ebola) resurfaces after several decades of dormancy, transported from the African continent to the United States via a monkey, the government wants to let go of a bomb on the contaminated town to stop the epidemic. Or when man becomes more dangerous than an ultra -contagious disease for his peers in a plot full of inconsistencies essential to his charm.
Independence DayRoland Emmerich (1996)
At the start of his cinema career, Will Smith appears in Independence Day: Riposte Daya film of Roland Emmerich He shares with the poster with Bill Pullman And Jeff Goldblum. Here, the danger comes from elsewhere, and takes the form of flying saucers piloted by small (large) green men (gray) in the air not frankly benevolent. Half disaster film, half movie of extraterrestrials, Independence day has become cult, and that, it owes it as much to more spectacular sequences as each other (the disintegration of the White House, that of the Empire State Building, the opening of the Aliens vessel, Aerial Guerilla), that in its not very subtle scripture springs (we remember the metaphor of failures) and his assumed references to classics of science fiction, Third -type meetings,, Alien And Star Wars in mind. In short, an uncompromising film, which is not afraid to touch what America has most sacred. Normal, it is a German who realizes him.
TwistJan de Bont (1996)
In Genesis, Noah saves a couple of cows from the deluge, in Twist,, Jan de Bont makes them fly. “We go cows!” The character of Melissa is written. Psychologist by profession, she was dragged into the heart of a storm by her fiancé, Bill Harding (Bill Paxton), come to have the paper of the divorce sign for his ex-partner, Jo Thornton (Helen Hunt), which has only one goal in mind: to test the effectiveness of Dorothy, a tornado study device. With a scenario signed by Michael Crichton And Spielberg in production, Twist is at the forefront of what can be done in the 1990s in terms of visual effects. The proof? An Oscar appointment of the best special effects in 1997.
VolcanoMick Jackson (1997)
The city of angels turns into a real hell when it pushes him a volcano ready to vomit lava torrents on its population who is used to the hot weather. Tommy Lee Jones Camps Mike Roark, the director of the city’s emergency office, and a resigning father (there is always one in this kind of film). With Amy (Anne heche), young scientist a whistleblower, he attributes the mission (impossible) to stop this apocalypse. What to give to Jones a aura of hot heroes like embers, and Mick Jacksonthe director, the opportunity to definitively turn the page a little too honeyed by Bodyguardwho saw a romance between Whitney Houston And Kevin Costner Five years earlier.
ArmageddonMichael Bay (1998)
Impossible to make such a classification without mentioning Armageddonwhose title, a biblical reference, designates the place of the last battle between the forces of good and evil during the last judgment. Metonymy fatal, he is used to add a little fatalist credit to this film with a more than improbable script and whose suspense resides in the awaiting the destruction of the earth by an asteroid in the size of Texas. Pro-active expectation because NASA decides to send a handful of oil drivers conducted, in this suicide mission, by a Bruce Willis (Who else?) Messianic. A masterpiece of the Catastrophe film which concentrates all the contradictions of a genre that we love to hate, with four nominations of the Oscars (best sound, best visual effects, best sound montage, best original song) and a raid award for Willis.
Twisters: Glen Powell’s beautiful tribute to Bill Paxton