Dante's peak

Dante’s Peak Film review
Harry Dalton (Pierce Brosnan) is a volcano expert whose interest became more than just a mere job after he lost the his fiancé during a volcano eruption in Columbia. When he is sent to investigate unusual seismic activity in the quiet Pacific Northwest town of Dante's Peak, he discovers people boiled to death in the local hot spring and plant and animal life dying or displaying unusual illnesses near the city's supposedly dormant volcano. Harry becomes convinced that a major volcanic catastrophe is definitely going to occur. Rachel Wando (Linda Hamilton), the town's mayor, is a single mother who also runs the local cafe, and now that Dante's Peak has been named one of the most desirable small towns in America , population being less than 20,000, tourists have been flocking to the diner and other local businesses. While concerned with the safety of her community, Rachel also doesn’t take heed to Harry's warnings about the volcano; she has no desire to alarm either the town's residents or the wealthy visitors who are enriching the town. Just as the city council put the town on alert, Dante's Peak erupts. Harry and Rachael must find their way through ash, lava, acid lakes and a pyroclastic cloud to escape from the volcano, and save Rachael's mother and her two children.
They orchestrate the special effects so that they look quite realistic. The visual effects of the mountain erupting, ash taking over the air like a snowstorm, a block of stores shattering into the street, lava flowing down, a dam bursting, a bridge being swept away and the entire town being made a ruin overnight are an eyeful; the chaos is clear and realistic. The soundtrack is especially effective. The opening music is purposely gothic, which I think puts volcanic eruptions in the right perspective. Brosnan and Hamilton are actors who play practical and don't go over the top, never screaming, not even when molten lava sets their truck tires on fire. A few events that caused areas of disbelief included Dalton's vehicle going over a bed of hot lava and coming out rather intact and Dalton outrunning a pyroclastic flow of ash and gas.
The first hour or so of the movie is spent building up an unprofessional relationship between its two main characters, volcanologist Harry Dalton and the Mayor of Dante's Peak, Rachel Wando. I think it is a good idea to add in some emotional depth to the characters in a disaster movie, as this leads to much more tension and sympathy for the victims when the disaster strikes. However, in the case of an action film like Dante's Peak it doesn’t really work. We the audience have come to see or to learn about the before, during and after effect of a volcanic eruption and Dante's Peak stays too long to deliver.
Geographically speaking, I would say this film did quite well. When analysing the volcano for signs of eruption, he included methods like testing the acidity of the water, testing the vegetation- how long ago plants or trees died, heat of lakes- after finding a couple that were skinny- dipping boiled to death, analysis of the gas- testing the amount of sulphur in the town’s main water supply after seeing brown water coming out of the tap for drinking, using a seismometer to measure the tremors in the ground by the volcano, and using a tilt meter to measure the change in the slope of the volcano. The film just confirmed the events I knew that took place, and the changes made to the country, considering whether it happens to be a LEDC or MEDC(which in this case happened to be a LEDC, as they were just a small town, population less than 20,000, meaning they didn’t have the equipment to be prepared for a volcanic eruption).