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Years ago I had the great fortune of living in Vancouver, Washington, across the beautiful Columbia River from Portland, and every day I watched the skyline of Mt St. Helens as I drove to work downtown. Fifty years before that, my dad peered up at St. Helens as he walked to school in that same Pacific Northwest town. The big difference of what he saw–compared to what I saw–was the top of the mountain was gone, destroyed more than 15 years before I got there when the volcano reared its force across southwest Washington, devastating the forests and towns and lives of several people nearby, killing nearly 60 people, nearly 7,000 deer, elk and bears, and 12 million fish.
The eruption was still a topic of conversation years after the blast. Vancouver had been covered in ash. People shoveled ash like it was snow, and it even looked like dirty snow. Vancouver and towns closer to the blast zone’s 230 square mile destruction area were just plain lucky the 24 megaton blast of energy didn’t stretch any further. Even 20 years after the blast, remnants remained. We were having our home re-roofed and a worker fell through into our family room pulling with him pounds and plumes of ash that had sat quietly in the shingles and attic all those years.
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As a kid watching the blast on TV, I learned a new word: pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis, a disease from inhaling the ash and in its plural form the biggest word in Webster’s Dictionary. The blast also brought memories from my dad about his service days around the city Pompeii, including reviewing his photos of the aftermath of Mt. Vesuvius and solidified stone tombs still documenting the last acts of the townspeople. With 1,934 years removed from the tragic event, it’s easy to marvel at how interesting these people looked. Yet I had a newly found sense of horror last week, reading the New York Times front page news of Syria. Horrific photos showed the gassed suburb of Damascus, with families also found dead in various states of simply living their lives, left in this strange, unreal-yet-too-real and disturbing way. These people were of course murdered, in contrast to the Vesuvius natural disaster, but both events are similarly shocking.
Disaster movies have to bridge several themes to accurately reflect an event that is the premise, and often title, to the film, but all too often gets relegated to background setting and nothing more. Filmmakers must illustrate the scope of the disaster and also not forget the lives of those lost in these dramatized catastrophes. Past films have touched on the sinking of the Titanic, 9-11, the Holocaust, and hundreds more about fires, floods, and earthquakes. The disaster movie often overlaps the historical fiction, costume drama or period piece, focusing on some key event in our history, including films (good and bad) like 300, Alexander, Ben-Hur, Braveheart, Gladiator, Henry V, Kingdom of Heaven, Les Miserables, Tombstone, and Troy.
Check out this first trailer for the 2014 release Pompeii:
Before drifting into what seems to be a pop music backed romance story, we see the haunting images of the buried-alive people of Pompeii in the newly released trailer for the 2014 big screen release Pompeii. And we see the impressive force of the volcano as it destroys the city and its inhabitants. How will this new disaster film/costume drama deal with the reality, with the event itself, and with the legend that the intervening years have created? Will it be light popcorn fare or an impressive look at one of the most talked about of ancient natural disasters, which hasn’t had a good modern presentation for the masses yet? I for one am hoping for something more in the next trailer released.
Pompeii is scheduled to premier February 21, 2014, and includes a relatively unknown cast plus Carrie-Anne Moss (The Matrix, Chuck), Kiefer Sutherland (24, A Few Good Men, The Lost Boys), Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje (Lost, G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra, Thor: The Dark World), Jared Harris (Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows), and Sasha Roiz (Grimm, Warehouse 13).
*Please pardon the “Blasts from the Past” tag above (ahem).
C.J. Bunce
Editor
borg.com
Image may be NSFW.
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