I know that criticizing the realism of a disaster movie is like criticizing the acting quality of a porno, but I shall persist. Volcanoes make for such tempting movies. The image of molten rock destroying everything in its path as people try to flee is embedded in our culture. But Hollywood, not one to care about facts, seeds lies in the minds of viewers.
I’m going to focus on the two blockbuster volcano movies released in 1997: Dante’s Peak and Volcano. I covered them briefly here, but now I’m going to cover their scientific inaccuracies.
Dante’s Peak
Dante’s Peak was by far the more scientifically accurate movie, they even hired volcanologists as consultants. But even so, the writers could not resist making sh*t up.
The eruption in the movie begins a massive earthquake that demolishes the town in such a dramatic way that you could base a movie around that even without the volcano. In reality, volcanoes are not capable of creating such shaking. The earthquakes caused by volcanoes are the result of rocks cracking under the pressure of the magma, and the shaking generated by that is not close to what happens when tectonic plates get stuck as they slide past each other.
Here’s the dilemma with volcanoes: you can either have fast moving scary lava or you can have a big violent explosion of ash, you can’t have both (unless you want to ignore facts).
Shield volcanoes, which are flat and wide, produce very runny lava. These volcanoes usually are under the sea, although sometimes they can become so big that they can reach above the water (e.g. Hawaii and Iceland). Because the lava is so runny, gas easily escapes with no muss.
Stratovolcanoes are the stereotype of a volcano that we think of as a tall mountain. The volcano in Dante’s Peak is clearly a Stratovolcano. The lava that these produce is highly viscous and moves slowly. And because of that, gas gets trapped and is released violently. That sends the magma into the air where it solidifies and turns into ash.
This is why photos of Hawaiian eruptions are dominated by lava while photos of Mt St Helens are of ash. But Dante’s Peak wanted to have it both ways with ash that blankets the town and causes helicopters to fall from the sky and forces the protagonists to seek shelter in a mineshaft and fast moving lava that swallows up Grandma’s log cabin.
The movie’s most famous scene, arguably, is when the group escapes from Grandma’s house on a boat. But then it turns out the lake is acidic and begins to destroy the boat forcing Grandma to sacrifice herself pulling the boat to shore. Lakes can and have been turned acidic by volcanic gases. But these lakes are almost all sitting near long dormant craters. It is simply not possible for the lake to turn acidic in just a few hours.
Lava is hot. In other news: bears sh*t in the woods. But seriously, it’s really hot, able to reach over 2000 degrees Farenheit. Even the heat radiating from it can set plants on fire. If they actually tried driving across a lava flow, they would’ve been very dead quickly.
Volcano
Volcano is clearly meant to be ridiculous. I imagine that when they were brainstorming ideas for a new disaster movie, they had a list that looked something like this:
Ways to Destroy Los Angeles
Earthquake (Everyone’s Done it) |
Volcano |
Shark Infested Tornados |
But I’m still going to dissect everything wrong with it.
Let’s start with the movie’s basic premise. No, no, no! There is absolutely no way whatsoever that a volcano could erupt in the middle of Los Angeles.
The San Andreas fault is a transform fault, where two tectonic plates are sliding past each other. This type of fault does not allow volcanoes to form. And it also limits how powerful the quakes it produces can be, which debunks the cliche of “the big one” destroying California.
Volcanoes are usually formed at convergent boundaries. Places where this happens include the Pacific Northwest (like in the movie above and at Mt St Helens) and Alaska, but apparently, nobody would care if Seattle got consumed by lava, especially since its 1997, and the only Amazon people know of is the rainforest in South America.
Many of the mistakes are similar to that of Dante. Once again they underestimate the heat of lava. There are many scenes with characters standing just a few feet away from the hot molten rock of hell where in reality they’d be very dead.
And again, this movie incorrectly depicts both ash and runny lava. In this case, this volcano is clearly a shield volcano, so there’d wouldn’t be all this ash.
The only thing stupider than this volcano’s existence is the way they stop it. First, they install concrete highway dividers to hold the lava. Then they spray it with all of the city’s fire engines and helicopter water tankers. This is absolutely absurd on every single level:
A. Lava is molten rock, but somehow concrete, which is rock, is able to stop it
B. Helicopters flying in all this would have their engines jammed up with ash and crash. This is correctly depicted in Dante.
C. All the water being dropped on this magma would cause a violent explosion of rock.
A man who rescues a conductor who had been trapped in a subway meets a fiery death by jumping into the lava so as to sacrifice himself by throwing the conductor to safety. He then melts like the Wicked Witch of the West. Human don’t melt, they burn. And again, given the heat, both of them would’ve been cooked while in the subway car.
Conclusion
You may call me pedantic for hating on disaster movies not explicitly following science. But I find it fun to pick movies apart, I do watch a lot of Cinemasins. And these types of inaccuracies make me want to blow my stack.