The escapism of disaster movies

Ahead of the impending disaster of family holidays, children with not enough to do over the summer break, anxiety brought on by the increasingly mad cabinet announcements of US president-elect Donald Trump and another year of more uncertainty ahead of us, this week’s column offers good old-fashioned escape from the real world through the ever-popular genre of disaster movies.

They used to be the biggest, loudest form of escapism the movies had to offer during their peak 1970s era, when real-world problems such as the war in Vietnam, Watergate and economic uncertainty were too depressing to face and audiences flocked to the biggest screens they could to watch heroic characters save the world from the horrors of raging fires, violent seas, earthquakes and terrorist attacks.

These days the disaster genre has evolved to become a big spectacle means of reflecting on the nagging underlying anxieties of our present, but it continues to offer the kind of big action special effects-filled bombast that audiences have loved since it rose to cinematic prominence half a decade ago.

THE ARTHOUSE ESSENTIAL: Gravity — Rent or buy from Apple TV +

It’s 11 years since Alfonso Cuarón’s groundbreaking space set, solo hero disaster film took audiences and critics by storm and swept up seven Oscars for its efforts.

Sandra Bullock stars as Ryan Stone, who after her ship is hit by debris during a spacewalk is sent hurtling into the void, while her fellow astronaut Dr Matt Kowalski must use all his vast experience to save her so together they can make it back to Earth.

Expertly directed and technically impressive, Cuarón’s film is best seen in the 3D format it was originally shot and released for, where its awesome evocation of the sheer scale of space and its awesome unknowability remains unsurpassed in cinema history.

Focusing on Bullock’s Ryan and her philosophical, spiritual, psychological and physical struggles, it’s one of the few space or disaster films that examine the challenges of its characters through the lens of a woman, particularly the adversities she must overcome to be in the same place as her male counterpart.

Life in space, as the film’s tagline reminds us, is not so much incredible as it is impossible.

THE STONE COLD CLASSIC: The Poseidon Adventure — Rent or buy from Apple TV +

Hollywood disaster films took off in the 1970s and nobody capitalised on their popularity as successfully as producer Irwin Allen, who was behind two of the eras biggest hits, The Towering Inferno and the ship-set disaster blockbuster The Poseidon Adventure.

Directed by Ronald Neame and based on a 1969 novel by Paul Gallico, the film stars a cast that includes five Oscar winners — Gene Hackman, Shelley Winters, Ernest Borgnine, Red Buttons and Jack Albertson — who play characters connected by their presence on the titular HMS Poseidon, an ageing luxury cruise liner making its final voyage from New York to Athens when its struck by a tsunami on New Year’s Day.

As the survivors emerge from the chaos they soon discover they’ll have to trust a preacher and fellow passenger who stand up to lead them out of the floating coffin to safety. They’re also about to learn several important lessons about themselves along the way.

It’s not a film likely to make you think too deeply about the big questions of life, the universe and everything else. But due to a solid focus on character, thrilling execution of set pieces and a strong ensemble cast, it laid the foundations for what the genre has to offer when it’s done properly. It helped to spawn a slew of substandard imitators that continue to flood screens to this day.

THE DIAMOND IN THE ROUGH: Don’t Look Up — Netflix

Adam McKay’s star-studded black comedy climate disaster film was divisive on its release, but seems unfortunately all-too prescient as we prepare for Trump 2.0 and witness another year in which the warnings about climate change continue to taken too lightly by many of the world’s most developed nations.

Featuring a cast that includes Leonardo DiCaprio, Jennifer Lawrence and Meryl Streep, it’s an energetic high jink, panicked farce about what happens when a myopic and increasingly idiotic nation is faced with the undeniable threat of a meteor heading towards Earth that will obliterate humanity. The solution the president and her self-interested support base come up with is to completely ignore the problem by refusing to look at it, no matter how much more visible the threat in the sky becomes.

Accused — not always unfairly — of been smug in its righteousness and harsh in its dismissal of those who refuse to acknowledge the realities of the climate crisis, the film has held up as a necessary and sharp attack on denialists who continue to use their influence to stop the world from dealing with a very real impending crisis and its consequences to all of us who live on planet Earth.