a list of disaster movies that have nothing to do with epidemics
This week is bad for a lot of people, for a lot of reasons. I have about 95% of a newsletter written about the amazing plotting in The Wicked and the Divine. It’s great. I quote Aristotle AND Emily Nussbaum, along with two or three academics because I went overboard on my research (again). I was planning on posting it tonight, but honestly: would anyone read it? Getting into the nitty-gritty of what constitutes tragic irony isn’t the greatest distraction from the news.
I’ve seen a lot of folks mentioning amazing books that feel eerily prescient (Song For a New Day and Infomocracy) or examine how societal infrastructures bend or break under the pressures of pandemics. Ling Ma’s Severance comes to mind, and Nisi Shawl just wrote an excellent roundup of such stories for The Seattle Review of Books, which happens to include a short review of my novella FINNA, along with a delightfully scathing review of using teleconferencing technology to listen in on a panel, which Shawl describes as “suboptimal; they [fellow panelists] sounded as if they were talking through the anuses of dead frogs.”
Personally, though? I think I’ve maxed out my pandemic intake. It’s all over my social media; the majority of my friends are in either the medical field or education, with large portions of sci-fi writers, hospitality and retail industry folk, and journalists rounding out my timelines. Today, for some reason, felt like the day that shit REALLY hit the fan.
So yeah: I need a distraction from this particular doomsday scenario by joyfully wallowing in OTHER doomsday scenarios.
This is how my brain works. Maybe it’s how yours works as well. If so: feel free to enjoy this list of four terrible disaster movies, followed by one good one. None of them have anything to do with infectious disease.
1) Independence Day (1996)
ID4 was the gold standard for pre-9/11 disaster movies. It was mindlessly patriotic, it had Will Smith, it had a shitty dad redeeming himself by flying a F-16 up the butthole of a spaceship while shouting “Up yours!” It saved the dog! (ALWAYS SAVE THE DOG.) It also had one of the kindest gay jokes I’ve ever seen. Everything I knew about New York City as a tween, I learned from Harvey Fierstein’s and Judd Hirsch in this movie.
2) Deep Impact (1998)
Somehow, this isn’t a porn parody of Armageddon. It’s just the better version of it that includes, among other things:
Elijah Wood as an astronomy nerd who also knows how to ride a dirtbike
Tasha Yar! Or at least, the actress who played her.
Another shitty dad redemption arc! (can’t have a disaster movies without a disaster dad)
A guy calmly reading a newspaper and wearing a bowtie while ignoring a mega-tsunami bearing down on him, which is certainly SOME kinda commentary
3) The Day After Tomorrow (2004)
Apparently, this one is based on a book by Whitley Strieber, whose other books populated the “Paranormal Studies” shelf at my local Borders Books when I was a teenager. His Wikipedia entry is a fun read, and he and Roland Emmerich are a dream team for what is basically the Platonic ideal of a blockbuster disaster film. It’s got the requisite shitty dad, an extremely awkward romantic subplot, ESCAPED WOLVES OH NO, and New York being flooded and then frozen over, because tsunamis were no longer enough. Oh, and Americans have to escape to Mexico, which is just like, “sure come on in I GUESS.”
4) 2012 (2009)
I have to give 2012 kudos for a truly “hold my beer” plot. It’s got solar flares! Earth’s core is heating up! Polar shifts! Something about the Mayan calendar! (Remember how many white people were really into the Mayan calendar in the late 00’s?) And then literally every continent except Africa explodes or falls into the ocean.
As I remember, the chain of events is like, Yellowstone supervolcano explodes —> West Coast gets dropkicked into the Pacific —> Hawaii melts —> nobody cares about Europe —> mega-tsunami engulfs the entirety of Asia, including Mount Everest —> rich people are the real humanitarian crisis, shocker.
5) The Poseidon Adventure (1972)
Jaws may have scared people out of the water, but The Poseidon Adventure put me off cruise ships forever. It somehow manages to be that rarest of creatures: a celebrity-studded disaster blockbuster that is actually… mostly good? And was generally well received by both critics and audiences? My theory here is that Poseidon Adventure isn’t relying solely on effects to keep audiences’ interest. Instead, it dives face-first into theology, peppering personal conflicts with philosophical digressions, all while leaning into its extremely claustrophobic set design and excellent action sequences.
If you do end up watching any of the first four films on this list, The Poseidon Adventure makes for an excellent palate cleanser. The disaster is small, contained, and terribly intimate. There are weird and interesting characters, and the tension is equally derived from their conflicts as well as the ocean trying to murder them. Most importantly, there are NO shitty dads in this film, unless God counts, and God does not get redeemed by the end of the film.
If you like what I write, please consider buying one of my books: Homesick is a collection of short speculative stories centering queer and trans characters, while FINNA is a novella about queer heartbreak, working retail, and wormholes. You can also support me on Patreon or buy me a ko-fi.