Dante's Peak

Dante's Peak is a 1997 American disaster thriller film directed by Roger Donaldson. Starring Pierce Brosnan, Linda Hamilton, Charles Hallahan, Elizabeth Hoffman, Jamie Renée Smith, Jeremy Foley and Grant Heslov, the film is set in the fictional town of Dante's Peak where the inhabitants fight to survive a volcanic eruption. The film was released on February 7, 1997, under the production of Universal Pictures and Pacific Western Productions. Despite mostly negative reviews, it was a box office success.

Plot
In 1993, USGS volcanologist Dr. Harry Dalton and his lover, Marianne, witness an eruption in Colombia. As they try to escape, a volcanic bomb crashes through the roof of Harry's truck and strikes Marianne on the head, killing her, and devastating the former.

Four years later, Harry is assigned by his superior, Dr. Paul Dreyfus, to investigate seismic activity near Dante's Peak, a town in Washington that borders a dormant stratovolcano. Harry arrives at the town and meets with Mayor Rachel Wando and her children, Graham and Lauren.

Rachel offers to take Harry with them as they see her former mother-in-law, Ruth, who lives near a lake at the base of the volcano. While exploring, they find dead trees, dead squirrels, and even a young couple boiled to death in a hot spring heated by the volcano's magma. Paul arrives with a USGS team that evening, and they set up a base to monitor the volcano. Harry believes the disturbances to be signs of an impending eruption, but Paul disagrees and advises against giving a false alarm. Still, Harry tries to convince Rachel to prepare for a disaster, while developing a relationship with her and the children.

A few days later, Harry and his colleague, Terry, go to the volcano's summit crater to obtain further evidence, but when an earthquake strikes, Terry suffers a broken leg when trapped in a rock slide, necessitating a chopper to lift them off the volcano. Still, Paul denies evidence that such danger is evident, and the USGS team begins preparing to leave. When Harry goes to say goodbye to Rachel, they reveal that the town's water supply has been contaminated by sulfur dioxide, and the next morning, seismic readings and gas levels rise dramatically. Finally convinced that the volcano will eventually erupt, and with the Washington National Guard unavailable until the next day, Paul gives Harry permission to put the town on alert. During a town meeting taking place at the high school, an earthquake strikes, sending residents into a panicking frenzy. As the volcano erupts, Harry and Rachel go to retrieve the children but find a letter explaining that they went to get Ruth, who refuses to leave her home. Minutes after they reach Ruth and the children, a lava flow engulfs Ruth's cabin and destroys the vehicles. The five flee across the lake in a motorboat, but the lake has become acidic due to sulfur-rich gases from the volcano, destroying the motor and eating away at the boat. Ruth jumps out of the boat to help it to shore, but sustains severe chemical burns and eventually dies from her injuries the next morning with her family and Harry at her side.

The heat from the volcano melts the glaciers on the peak, forming a lahar that collapses a dam on the river leading into town. During a lull in the eruption, Harry and the Wandos take a ranger's truck and set off back to town, where the Washington National Guard is helping evacuate residents. A bridge over the lahar fails, and while the USGS team makes it across, their van and Paul are lost in the flood. Meanwhile, Harry and the Wandos are forced to drive across a huge lava flow in their path, barely making it and rescuing Ruth's dog, Roughy, along the way. When they arrive back in the deserted town, Harry retrieves a distress radiobeacon from the USGS base but learns from a laptop that the volcano is due for a second, even more violent eruption. Sure enough, as he and the Wandos begin to leave, the volcano violently explodes, releasing a massive pyroclastic cloud that annihilates everything in its path. With no way out of town, Harry and the Wandos narrowly make it to an abandoned mine. Watching the eruption from afar, the USGS team presume Harry and the Wandos to be dead.

Inside the mine, Harry forgets the beacon and goes back for it. Another earthquake strikes, causing rocks to fall onto the truck and leaving Harry with a broken arm, but despite the struggle, he still manages to activate the beacon.

A few days later, Terry notices that the beacon has been activated, and the USGS dispatches search and rescue teams. Harry and the Wandos are freed from the mine, reunited with Harry's team, and airlifted out by a helicopter. As the credits roll, the camera pans over the obliterated town before turning to the volcano, now reduced to a Mount St. Helens-like caldera.

Cast

 * Pierce Brosnan as Dr. Harry Dalton
 * Linda Hamilton as Mayor Rachel Wando
 * Charles Hallahan as Dr. Paul Dreyfus
 * Jeremy Foley as Graham Wando
 * Jamie Renée Smith as Lauren Wando
 * Elizabeth Hoffman as Grandma Ruth
 * Grant Heslov as Greg
 * Arabella Field as Nancy
 * Tzi Ma as Stan
 * Bill Bolender as Sheriff Turner
 * Peter Jason as Norman Gates
 * Lee Garlington as Dr. Jane Fox
 * Jeffrey L. Ward as Jack Collins
 * Kirk Trutner as Terry Furlong
 * Brian Reddy as Les Worrell
 * Susie Spear as Karen Narlington
 * Walker Brandt as Marianne

Production
Principal photography began on May 6, 1996. The film was shot on location in Wallace, Idaho.

Exterior shots of the Point Dume Post Office in Malibu, California were used as 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, Mount St. Helens eruption and perished during the event.

A brief scene was shot inside the crater of Mount St. Helens. The scene involving the geological robot and the trapped scientist was shot inside the crater, as evidenced by a brief appearance by Mount Adams, a dormant 12776 ft peak 35 mi east of Mount St. Helens, as the view focuses on the scientists. The scene itself was actually filmed on the tarmac of Van Nuys Airport, while the Mount Adams image was composited in later. Production was completed on August 31, 1996.

Extensive special effects surrounding certain aspects of the film, such as the lava and pyroclastic flows, were created by Digital Domain, Banned from the Ranch Entertainment and CIS Hollywood. The computer-generated imagery was mostly coordinated and supervised by Patrick McClung, Roy Arbogast, Lori J. Nelson, Richard Stutsman and Dean Miller. Although the film uses considerable amounts of CGI, the volcanic ash in the film was created using cellulose insulation manufactured by Regal Industries in Crothersville, Indiana. Between visuals, miniatures, and animation, over 300 technicians were directly involved in the production aspects of the special effects. Despite the complexity of its visual effects, Dante's Peak was not nominated for an Academy Award for Best Visual Effects that year, as it faced stiff competition from The Lost World: Jurassic Park, Starship Troopers and Titanic, the eventual winner of the award.

Locations

 * Agua Dulce, California, US
 * Baker Hot Springs, Mount Baker National Forest, Washington, US
 * Mount St. Helens National Volcanic Monument, Washington, US (establishing shots)
 * Wallace, Idaho, US (town exteriors)
 * Mirror Lake, Sagle, Idaho, US (Grandma Ruth's house)

Music
The original score was co-composed by John Frizzell and James Newton Howard. Howard wrote the main theme (heard during the opening titles) and a number of cues, while Frizzell wrote the bulk of the score.

30 minutes of the score was released by Varèse Sarabande; the short album length being due to high orchestra fees at the time of release. An expanded bootleg exists that contains almost the entire score.

The contents of the CD release can also be found on the region 1 DVD, and Blu-ray on an alternate audio track during the 'Creating a Volcano' documentary.

The "Main Titles" cue is also featured on Varèse's The Towering Inferno and Other Disaster Classics compilation album.

Release
The film was released on February 7, 1997 in 2,657 theatres. It debuted at #2 at the box office behind the special edition re-release of Star Wars with $18 million in its opening weekend. After 8 weeks in theatres, it went on to gross $67.1 million in the United States and $111.0 million overseas; it went on to earn $178 million worldwide.

Reception
Although it had a wider financial success and being considerably more scientifically accurate than Volcano, Dante's Peak received mostly negative reviews compared to its rival: Rotten Tomatoes gave the film a 24% rating based on 29 reviews, compared to a 48% rating from 42 reviews for Volcano. The consensus states: "Dante's Peak works when things are on fire, but everything else from dialogue to characters is scathingly bad."