From hurricanes to shipwrecks to molten lava to alien invasions, the disaster movie pits us humans at our best (or worst), and gives a select group of almost always beautiful-looking people the chance to make it out alive. These are the 10 greatest disaster movies ever made:
Along with flying cows, one of the more interesting twists in the storm-chasing thriller Twister is its leading couple. In movies like Outbreak, Independence Day and 2012, it’s the stagnating husband who has to win back his jet-setting ex. Not so in Twister, where Bill Paxton is the collared shirt wearing sellout, while soon-to-be ex-wife Helen Hunt has to lure him back to the passion project that united them.
Some say the world will end in fire, but in The Day After Tomorrow Dennis Quaid tells us emphatically it will end in ice. Of course no on listens to him, so when the North Atlantic Current abruptly reverses course the world’s leaders are caught unprepared--some quite literally--by the biggest planetary weather event in more than 10,000 years.
Stephen Soderbergh brought the multilinear style he used in 2005’s Syriana to the disaster genre in 2011 with Contagion. The style, sometimes known as hyperlink cinema, was a natural fit for a disaster movie. It allowed the director to track the rapid spread of a lethal disease from a variety of simultaneous viewpoints. The film's all-star cast includes Laurence Fishburne, Matt Damon, Kate Winslet, Jude Law, Gwyneth Paltrow and Bryan Cranston.
A giant earthquake, a suicidal wife and psychotic national guardsmen are just a few of the problems Charlton Heston faces in 1974’s Earthquake. With help from George Kennedy and Shaft himself, Richard Roundtree, Heston leads a ragtag band of survivors through the ruins of Los Angeles. Get your hands off me, you damn dirty quake!
In Outbreak, Dustin Hoffman and Rene Russo race to stop the deadly Motaba virus before Donald Sutherland drops a giant bomb on an infected California town. Though the speed with which Hoffman synthesizes a magical cure may not be scientifically accurate, the rest of the movie feels eerily plausible. Fun fact: The capuchin monkey in Outbreak also became a sitcom star when he played Marcel on Friends.
Admit it, you can still sing every word of the Aerosmith theme song to Armageddon. Directed by Michael Bay and produced by Jerry Bruckheimer, Armageddon was the flashier competition to the summer of 1998’s other astronomical disaster movie, Deep Impact. Though today it falls squarely in the guilty pleasure category, the movie nonetheless features a great cast, sharp dialogue and a striking visual style.
Though not the first disaster film, The Poseidon Adventure nailed down the blueprint for future entries with its strong ensemble and stunning effects. Gene Hackman stars as an unorthodox preacher leading the handful of survivors smart enough to ignore the morons urging everyone to go the wrong way. While all disastermovies feature tragic deaths, The Poseidon Adventure delivers some of the most devastating sacrifices in the genre.
The Impossible is set against the backdrop of one of the most devastating natural disasters in recorded history. The movie is based on the real-life story of Dr. María Belón and her family, who were vacationing in Thailand when it was hit by the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami that took the lives of over 240,000 people in fourteen countries.
It may not have aged well but in 1997 Titanic was, to quote its leading man, the king of the world. That year James Cameron’s period spectacle won a whopping eleven Oscars. Sadly, as we all know, the romance at the heart of the film ends in tragedy when an older and obviously insane Rose throws away a priceless diamond necklace that could have put all her grandchildren through college
The Towering Inferno had all the elements that defined disaster movies in the 70s: a huge, all-star cast led by racing rivals Paul Newman and Steve McQueen, dazzling special effects, and a complex web of intertwined storylines. It also fell just short of winning the Best Picture Oscar when it was nominated in 1975, losing to a little movie called The Godfather: Part II.
Which disaster movie classics do you turn to when nothing will do besides seeing big cities get wrecked? Let us know in the comments below!
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