Dante’s Peak (1997) – What Happened to This Disaster Movie?
Do you ever go back and watch an awesome 90s film only to have a dark realization come over you that films will never be made that way again? That most of what you’re witnessing on screen would be a digitized shell of itself today? Today’s movie is one of those. A film that was released surrounded by such a golden age of special effects and practical filmmaking feats, we couldn’t possibly have appreciated it appropriately at the time. Not only was this disaster movie a spectacle to witness on the big screen, but scientifically responsible enough to be shown in science classes decades later. Something you’ll never say about Armageddon. Unless your science teacher had a drinking problem. Dante’s Peak was not only up against an audience on the cusp of disaster fatigue after the successful releases of Twister, Outbreak, and Independence Day. It was in a race against another disaster movie, also about volcanoes, literally called Volcano. And as Harrison Ford once found out, it’s tough to be in a race against Tommy Lee Jones. History wasn’t on their side, either. Eerily, the last disaster boom including films such as The Towering Inferno and Earthquake had been put to bed by a 1980 box office bomb aptly titled When Time Ran Out. Also about volcanoes. Would today’s film overcome and make its mark on the genre, or suffer the same fate? This is what happened to Dante’s Peak.
It all began with Courage Under Fire producer Joseph Singer watching a man die on film. Nice omen! Singer had been watching a video where a volcanologist gave a play-by-play on a volcanic eruption before realizing and saying out loud that his own death was imminent. He became fascinated with the job of a volcanologist and began to reach out to some of those in the field for more information before learning that many of them were also dead. Singer eventually found someone amongst the living, speaking to members of the United States Geological Survey group. From there, he became even more enamored with their courage and lifestyle. So, he decided he wanted to make a realistic movie about volcanoes and the people who studied them. Also, Twister had just come out in 1996. And that shit rocked.
Singer had been working with Nowhere to Run writer Leslie Bohem on Sylvester Stallone’s foray into unfortunate disasters with Daylight, and the two forged the script into something Universal wanted to buy. Gale Anne Hurd, alongside her legendary action experience on films like The Terminator and Aliens, was brought on as a producer. A perfect pairing with director Roger Donaldson, who not only studied geology in Australia but more importantly was good at bringing the sexy. Donaldson had films like Species, Cocktail, and No Way Out (the one where Kevin Costner sleeps with a very powerful Gene Hackman’s lady friend) already under his belt. Which lead to the casting of our majorly sexy lead duo: Pierce Brosnan and Linda Hamilton.
Brosnan was at a pretty sweet point in his career when he accepted the role of Harry Dalton in Dante’s Peak. The actor and probably the most handsome man I’ve ever laid eyes on in my entire life (was that out loud?) was in the midst of enjoying a career eruption of his own after the release of GoldenEye two years prior. The homewrecker from Mrs. Doubtfire admitted he was enjoying being the “it guy,” if only for the moment, after being dubbed “the guy that ‘should have been, could have been, almost was’” for many years. Hamilton gives one of her best post-T2 performances as Mayor Rachel Wando, a very worn-out small business owner and single mother with a fiery ex-mother-in-law. Who now has an even bitchier volcano to deal with.
Another fun “this movie came out right after Twister” reminder is the ensemble cast of volcano chasers. That sentence makes no sense. You can’t “chase” a volcano. But it still sounds better than “volcano watchers,” or the official title of “United States Geological Survey.” Okay, they don’t have a cool name. But they are a ragtag group of coffee-guzzling adventure seekers with hearts of gold and solid senses of humor helping out a town about to rue the day they moved in next to a volcano. I’m talking “imminent rue-age”. Leading the group is Harry’s boss, Paul, played by the late Charles Hallahan in one of his final roles. You may remember Hallahan from horror classic The Thing, or his role in John Leguizamo’s The Pest. Which, ironically, released the very same week as our volcano movie. Yet another memorable face belongs to Greg, played by Grant Heslov, teammates with Arnold Schwarzenegger in ’90s classic True Lies. Actors Peter Jason, Tzi Ma, Elizabeth Hoffman, and Kirk Trutner round out the cast but we all know who the real star of the show is: The volcano… and essentially… the special effects.
It took a village to accumulate the many location shots of Dante’s Peak. The fictional town itself is actually in Wallace, Idaho while surrounding mountain scenery (including that bitch-ass volcano) were added digitally. Other sets were built in various places, such as the Van Nuys Airport, which accommodated large open areas where the shit would be allowed to hitteth the proverbial fan. Meanwhile, some of the post-destruction shots come from real footage of the Mount St. Helens eruption of 1980. Director Roger Donaldson claimed that the town had to put up with a lot of noise from their production but that their presence also gave the small mining area a significant economic boost. A small price to pay for having a portion of your home significantly covered in ash. Or in this case ground-up newspaper: a safe replicant they didn’t have to worry about breathing in.
For more complicated effects including pyroclastic flows and bridges being ripped apart like string cheese, a company called Digital Domain was hired. It was a time before most effects were unconvincingly manufactured alone on a computer screen, but it was the dawn of a hybrid pairing between both digital and practical effects . The production constructed awe-inspiring miniatures and used digital techniques to add layers of realism overtop of them as they were destroyed. To realistically and practically create the impressive and frightening smoke and ash clouds, the crew used air cannons and around six hundred pounds of gray fuller’s earth per pop. They shot the scenes at 250 frames a second while shooting the smoke 100 feet into the air for a matter of seconds at a time. These scenes were shot near the Palmdale Airport and then impressively rendered into the film digitally.
A digital effects company called Banned from the Ranch Entertainment, or BFTR for short, was hired after… you guessed it… their work on Twister. The company also had high-profile work on films like Spawn, Starship Troopers, and Congo over the years. On this occasion, one of their jobs was to create and supervise all of the computer graphics displays in Dante’s Peak. This may not seem like an important part of a volcano film, but how else are you supposed to let the audience know that the antagonist of the film was gearing up to spew? Where the film couldn’t communicate to the audience that the lava was preparing for annihilation deep down in its hole of holes; the on-screen graphics, needles, and frequencies could.
Dante’s Peak also had the largest water release in film history up to that point. The crew built a four-story-tall set with a release point in the front, one in the back, and a large receiving tank to collect the water beneath them. One side was used for the massive dam collapse scene, while the other was used for the bridge destruction, as well as various other body of water shots. These were among many scenes shot at the no-longer-existing Air National Guard hangars in Van Nuys Airport.
All of this was, of course, being done in a race to beat Tommy Lee Jones’ Volcano release date. No one wanted to be the second of two volcano films released within months of each other, and the studios refused to work together. The crews worked twelve to fifteen hour days, seven days a week. It was such an open secret that the two were rushing to finish first, the set had “location assistants” act as security guards for those entering the premises, in part just to make sure no spies from Volcano were sneaking on set. All of this rushing was being done while under a mandate from the studio and director that each moment remain as scientifically true as dramatically possible. Thankfully for them, volcanologists remained on set to assist with the realism of it all. Still, with Universal determined to get out ahead, the post-production time for Dante’s Peak was essentially cut in half. Thanks, suits!
The production hired famed composer James Newton Howard to create the score, but he was apparently just as pressed for time as the filmmakers. Howard created the main theme and a few other moments before handing off his duties to newcomer and Beavis and Butt-Head Do America score composer John Frizzell.
Dante’s Peak was released in theaters on February 7, 1997, in the midst of the original Star Wars movies being re-released in theaters. Which, to be fair, was a big deal back then. The Holy Trilogy had yet to be milked as it would be in the years to come. So, Dante’s Peak took second place on its own opening weekend to the re-release of A New Hope… in its second week. Though Dante’s Peak would somewhat recoup its $116 million budget, taking in $178 million overall… it was considered a box office bomb.
But after the production’s painstaking efforts to keep the film as realistic as possible without sacrificing entertainment, the real question beckons: how did the volcano and science community feel about Dante’s Peak? Pretty good, considering the USGS information page itself concluded that the movie’s depiction hit “close to the mark.” Another group of volcano experts noted their complaints that the mountain wouldn’t have spewed “Hawaiian-style” magma, the pair in the hot spring would have literally exploded (which is the process that takes place when magma actually hits water), and the acid lake wouldn’t have been quite that acidic yet. But if it were, it would have killed them by breathing it in alone, long before they were able to cross it. All in all, for a Hollywood disaster film, I’d say they did a pretty damn good job if these are the only gripes from the science community.
Movie critics weren’t so impressed.
It would appear that the 1996 literal boom of disaster films had taken a toll on not only audiences, but critics as well. Many of the reviews at the time spent more time complaining about disaster films as a whole than they spent talking about the movie itself. Others bemoaned that it took an hour for the volcano to explode before the albeit widely praised special effects could begin.
Looking at Dante’s Peak through a 2025 lens, I must declare this movie deserves a revisitation. Sure, the film takes a while to get going. But when you know that going in, it’s really not the slog some reviews make it out to be. Hell, we get to watch Brosnan and Hamilton charm each other, learn the inner politics of an beautiful small town, and are even treated to a horror genre staple when two horny folks are killed trying to skinny-dip bang in a hot spring. Oh, and speaking of horror, don’t forget an early volcanic eruption sequence when Pierce Brosnan’s ex has a goddamn fireball go through a truck roof and into her skull. Gnarly!
These aren’t just any, passable, special effects. The realistic carnage wreaked in Dante’s Peak is like a balm for the tired 2025 soul. Dante’s Peak’s second half is an all-out spectacle to behold, and it’s hard to shake the feeling that they just don’t make them like this anymore. And may never again. And that… is what happened to Dante’s Peak.
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