disaster movies

[threeplusfire]

I've always hated natural disaster movies. They make me twitchy and uncomfortable in ways that movies about war, monsters and madness have never been able to do. I remember a period in the late 1990s where it seemed like everything was a disaster movie - giant storms, volcanoes, asteroids hitting the planet, tornadoes, everything. They appear sporadically, filling me with dread and unease every time I have to sit through a preview in the theater. The appeal of them remains incomprehensible to me. I suppose it is because there is no understanding beyond "these terrible things happen sometimes and there really is no reason beyond the habits and peculiarities of nature." (Though there is definitely the trend of "humans fuck up the planet everything goes to hell" movie storyline as well which often ends up even worse and more ridiculous.)

Inevitability is a concept I don't handle well. Neither is the idea that some things just happen and there's no real reason or way to change that. Things happen. I hate that.

Watching the footage of the quake and the tsunami in Japan twists that same nerve. I suppose I can't enjoy these movies because my brain just does not recognize movie magic as different from the real thing, even at their most overdone. I wouldn't have ever imagined entire houses could bob like driftwood or the sheer volume of debris came from thousands of lives wrecked in moments. The videos on Youtube of the waves rushing in on the coast as cars speed away, the tiny figures of people on bridges or rooftops seem both unreal and painfully real.

Comments

[splix.livejournal.com]

I hate them too, and I hate more the inevitable end where at least *some* things are hunky-dory - yes, I get that moviemakers don't want to drown the viewer in depression, but the true inevitability of disasters is usually awful - if you're lucky enough not to have died, then you've got to deal with the losses of other life, property, land, all other sorts of upheavals.

I could be talking out of my ass, since I haven't watched a disaster movie in aeons. Could be they're more realistic, but I dunno. I watch movies to escape, not to see horrible cataclysms, and if I want to watch a soppy Hollywood ending I don't want it preceded by massive destruction, if that makes any sense.

[cymry.livejournal.com]

I have the same reaction to movies that take place in insane asylums. I just can't cope with them.