'' is a
1997 Action -
Adventure Film starring
Pierce Brosnan and
Linda Hamilton . It portrays the effect of a
Volcano erupting in a small town in the
Pacific Northwest portion of the
United States . It was released a few months before ''
Volcano '' and received wider success.http://www.ew.com/ew/report/0,6115,286475_7_0_,00.html It has also been acclaimed for its scientific accuracy, which ''Volcano'' lacked.
- ''The pressure is building.''
- ''Whatever you do, don't look back!''
- ''Without warning, day becomes night, air turns to fire, and solid ground gives way to white-hot, molten terror.
The film is set in the
Fictional Town of Dante's Peak,
Washington , located in the northern
Cascade Mountains but was actually filmed in and around
Wallace in
Northern Idaho . The film is somewhat based on the real-life eruptions of
Mount St. Helens in
1980 and
Mount Pinatubo in
1991 . The film is noted to have put emphasis on trying to accurately depict a
Volcanic Eruption .http://www.geol.umd.edu/pages/facilities/lmdr/dante/dante.htm]
The film begins with the volcanic eruption of an unnamed volcano in
Colombia (the script says this is
Galeras , and the eruption is presumably the 1993 eruption which killed several
Volcanologist s) where volcanologist Harry Dalton (Brosnan) attempts to evacuate with his fiancée Marianne. As they begin heading out of the town, large pieces of
Volcanic Rock s begin to crash onto the small town, one of which penetrates the vehicle and kills Marianne. Four years later, Harry is called in from vacation by his boss to investigate activity going on in the
Northern Cascades region near the town of Dante's Peak. At Dante's Peak, the town is receiving an award for being "The second most desirable place to live in the
United States , population under 20,000" and celebrating its annual "Pioneer Days Festival". Harry meets with the town's mayor, Rachel Wando (Hamilton), who accompanies him with her two children Graham, (Foley) and Lauren, (Smith) up to the mountain's "high lake" (high altitude lake located near the summit) to check the
Acid ity in the water. After checking the acidity and picking up the mayor's ex-mother in law, Ruth (Hoffman), the five of them head to the town's
Hot Springs where they encounter the bodies of two dead backpackers seared by volcanic activity under the hot springs.
After evaluating the situation, Dalton calls a town meeting to discuss the option of putting the town on alert. As this occurs, Dalton's boss, Paul Dreyfus (Hallahan) shows up to evaluate the mountain and goes against Dalton's decision for putting the town on alert based on an economically devastating decision made in 1980 when he put the towns around
Mammoth Mountain on alert without the mountain blowing. Despite feeling strongly against the decision, and being asked the leave, Dalton remains in the town to help Dreyfus and his
USGS crew Greg, Terry, Nancy, and Stan (Heslov, Trutner, Field, and Ma) evaluate the possible eruption of the mountain. Initially, tests show no sign that the mountain will erupt, and the crew begins to think about leaving the town. At the same time, Dalton begins to form a bond with the mayor and her children, turning romantic as the plot progresses. After the town's water supply becomes
Sulfur ic due to the acidity of the mountain breaching the town's springs, Dalton and his crew then decide to put the town on alert and call for an evacuation. Mayor Wando attempts to get her ex-mother-in-law to come down but she refuses, preferring instead to stay at the bed and breakfast she and her husband built higher up in the mountain.
as Harry Dalton in Dante's Peak.]]
During the town meeting alerting the citizens to evacuate, the mountain begins to erupt, causing a stampede and a rush for the town's citizens to evacuate.
Earthquake s cause the town's main highway to collapse and traffic jams clog the only other route out of town, causing chaos as citizens rush to escape. Meanwhile, the mayor's children steal her car and drive it up the mountain to their grandmother's cabin in hopes of getting her to come down with them. When Dalton and Wando try to reach the children, they discover them to have left for the summit to bring down their grandmother. As the eruption continues, the USGS crew prepares to depart the town and both Dalton and Wando head up the mountain after the children, only to find the grandmother still refusing to leave her home. Meanwhile, the grandmother's dog has run out of the house and into the woods. Down in the town, the mountain has expelled large amounts of ash and most residents have been killed or have escaped. The military shows up to aid in the evacuation as news crews begin to setup camp at a safe distance to cover the mountain's eruption.
Up the mountain, Dalton and Wando reach the bed and breakfast but don't initially find the children or their grandmother; after a few minutes of frantic searching they find them outside nearby, looking for the dog, and all make their way into the house where Ruth tells them to leave her alone and go back to the town. As they argue for her to come with them, a lava flow engulfs all three cars and parts of the house. The five of them flee to the nearby lake and take a metal boat across the river, leaving the dog, which was not found, behind. As they trek across, they realize that the lake has been turned to acid and is eating through the metal boat. The five of them then begin to sing hoping for the boat the make it across, but as they near the other end of the lake, the boat's motor fails. As it nears the edge of the lake, the boat begins to sink and Ruth jumps off to push it along to the pier before it sinks, though doing so causes her to suffer injuries from the lake's acidity. After evaluating her injuries, the five of them continue down the mountain with Dalton carrying Ruth on his back.
Back in the town, the USGS crew, the last ones left in the town, are evacuated by the military, but a
Lahar (volcanic caused mudslide) causes the small bridge to begin to break apart as they reach it. Both military vehicles, carrying the majority of people in the party, make it across, but the one USGS vehicle, driven by Dreyfus, does not make it and Dreyfus is killed as the bridge is washed away. Up the mountain, Ruth asks to be put down and after a talk with the children, she dies and her body is left there as the other four continue down the mountain. At a ranger station, they discover and
Hotwire a working truck and use it to continue down the mountain. While doing so, they encounter a lava flow that has blocked the route; the lava has mostly cooled on top but parts of it are still visibly simmering. As they manage to cross, they encounter and rescue the grandmother's dog who evidently circled the lake in the woods but became trapped on a rock surrounded by the lava flow. This rescue marks the turning point. Continuing down to the town, they discover the washed out bridge. Realizing that they have no other means of leaving the town, Dalton heads back to the USGS makeshift operations center and picks up a tracking device from NASA that had been showcased in an earlier segment and notices that computers are signaling that the mountain is about to blow completely. Heading back to the truck he begins to head towards the town's mines as the mountain's top blows and a giant
Pyroclastic Cloud engulfs the town. The truck makes it safely into the mine; the town is destroyed, to the USGS crew's dismay, as they believe Harry has been killed. Inside the mine, Harry retrieves the tracking device and turns it on and it flashes for "one or two days" before the four are rescued from the mine.
After being rescued from the mine by a huge team, Harry meets the rest of his crew who tell him that Dreyfus "didn't make it" and that "he got to see the show". Wando and her children are escorted out of the mine followed by applause from the rescue team for their survival. On board a
Helicopter , Graham asks Harry if he really meant what he said in the mine about taking them fishing and Harry confirms this with the words, "Sure did." He and Wando shake hands and Harry tells the helicopter pilot that they are ready to go. As the helicopter flies into the distance over the ruins of Dante's Peak, the camera turns towards the volcano, and the tense music suggests that it could erupt again at some point in the future.
Magma does not breach hot springs within seconds of water being at an enjoyable temperature for swimming.
Lakes, in many instances, can become extremely acidic due to volcanic activity. However, the matter of hours/days in which the 'High Lake' becomes so low pH that it causes a character to die is unrealistic.
Late in the film, a truck is seen driving across semi-cooled basaltic lava. This is far-fetched, as the heat from molten rock would likely ignite the gas tank, or at the very least melt the wheels, rendering any vehicle (and its occupants) incapacitated.
The presence of basaltic lava itself is not likely - volcanoes in the Cascade Range (where the film's volcano is set) typically erupt andesitic or rhyolitic flows which flow much more slowly.
Many other aspects of the film have been faithful to science and this has been noted among vulcanologists. The setting and the resultant panic created by the eruption is realistic. SO
2 being present, ash fall, landslides and pyroclastic flows are all potential features of stratovolcanoes in the Cascade Range in North America.
The film was shot on location in
Wallace, Idaho with a large hill next to the town digitally altered to look like a volcano. Many scenes involving townspeople, including the initial award ceremony, the pioneer days festival, and the gymnasium scene were shot using the actual citizens of Wallace as extras. Many of the disaster evacuation scenes that did not involve stunts and other dangerous moments also featured citizens of Wallace; dangerous stunts were filmed using Hollywood extras. A brief scene in the movie was actually shot inside the crater of Washington State's Mount St. Helens. Mount St. Helens also makes an appearance at the very end of the movie; during the start of the closing credit crawl, the scene shows an image of a destroyed Dante's Peak community with the camera shot moving out to show a wider scene of disaster, and then showing what remains of the volcano itself. The volcano that remains is actually an image of Mount St. Helens taken from news footage just after the
May 18 ,
1980 eruption.
Exteriors were also shot at the USGS's David A. Johnston Cascades Volcano Observatory headquarters in Vancouver, Washington. The facility was named in honor of
David A. Johnston , a young scientist who had precisely predicted the volatility of the
May 18 ,
1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens, and perished during the event.
