The 1985 earthquake movie and others depicting the terror of natural disasters

Disaster movies, those special effects-heavy blockbusters that set their sights on superhuman characters heroically taking on nature and trying to thwart catastrophic incidents, rose to prominence in the 1970s. Due to the massive success of Airport, The Poseidon Adventure Y the burning colossus. The genre went into a decade-long slumber, like a volcano, only to erupt in the mid-1990s with disaster epics and doomsday thrillers about tornadoes, asteroids, icebergs and volcanoes threatening us, including Dante’s Peak, volcano, twister Y Armageddonand have been a recurring genre on the Hollywood release calendar ever since.

However, beyond the spectacularization of natural phenomena and destruction, several disaster films that approach tragedy with humanity and emotion, allowing us to glimpse the most pressing collective anxieties of society.

‘7:19’

7:19directed by the Mexican filmmaker, Jorge Michel Grau, places his story in the bowels of the 1985 earthquake to show the side of those trapped (two of them masterfully played by Demián Bichir and Héctor Bonilla). Although it is a suspenseful drama with strong political and social criticism, the film is about those who lived through despair. between the metal rods, the broken glass, the damaged wood, the irritating dust, the annihilated partitions, the heavy concrete slabs and the oppressive darkness.

‘Wave’

Fantefilm Fiksjon AS2

In Waveby Norwegian director Roar Uthaug, we find ourselves before a story that, although it portrays a landslide accompanied by an 80-meter wave that wipes out an entire town, always remains on the verge of plausibility. Indeed, according to geologists who have studied the Storfjorden area, they have noted the risk posed by Åknesset Mountain, which is expected to one day shed a large amount of rock, roughly the weight of 225 Empire State Buildings, and produce a wave that would reach a peak of around 85 meters.

‘deep horizon’

Summit Entertainment

deep horizonstarring Mark Wahlberg, is a solid and convincing portrait, from fiction, of the tragic events that occurred on April 22, 2010, when a powerful explosion caused the largest oil spill in the entire history of the United States. Director Peter Berg proposes a visually grandiose and realistic action drama (even using much of the technical language and fundamentals of oil extraction) to place the viewer, through intense and anguish-filled sequences, in the midst of the catastrophe.

‘Pandora’

Cac Entertainment

Pandorafrom Korean Jeong-woo Parknarrates the political trickery and corruption networks to build a nuclear power plant in a small and peaceful town from South Korea. What at first is seen as an achievement for the generation of jobs, soon becomes catastrophic when an earthquake causes the power plant to explode, which did not have the relevant protocols to deal with the emergency. A simple but forceful story, without exaggerating the use of visual effects, an atmosphere of suspense and a clearly critical approach to how many disasters are the product of bad government decisions.

‘Godzilla rises’

Toho Company

Originally serving as an allegory for the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Godzilla (1954) was deeply rooted in Japan’s most pressing and historically devastating existential fears. This time, godzilla rises was conceived in a country still reeling from both the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster and the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami, both of which occurred in 2011. Hideaki Anno and Shinji Higuchi’s film isn’t as high-budget or CGI-heavy as its Hollywood counterparts, spending more time on war room debates than massive explosions.