Supervolcano (2005)

The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

I gave this film a 9 out of 10, because it was exactly what I expected it to be.

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

While I wouldn't consider it a blockbuster, I really didn't expect much from this movie. After watching I am very impressed. Somethings caught my eye however. Factual errors were made, but when you keep in mind that this is a British movie, not an American movie, you can accept these minor errors. All the graphics were really good, except one that looked like TV style graphics, but still good.If you need a good disaster movie and love volcanos...this is a movie for you. The science behind it all seemed really legit. I would say they were more spot on than blockbuster movies out there. It seems like they did their homework on the science.

By my armchair scientific knowledge, Supervolcano is well based on the geology of Yellowstone (which *is* a supervolcano). This docu-drama's strength is the telling of the prelude, occurrence, and consequences of the super-eruption which has already happened three times at Yellowstone and will again someday. Geologists wrestle over what they know and what they don't. Scientists, reporters, and government wrestle with the politics and ethics of what to tell the public. FEMA wrestles with how to prepare for the eruption, how to aid the millions affected by it, and realizing how little they can do. The world slowly realizes that they, not just the U.S., are affected.The acting, by largely unknown actors, is solid. Nothing special, but this isn't a character development movie. The story is solid. Plot holes are few, and the only one that affects the science is minor. Production values are BBC-solid. Story, dialogue, and videography are restrained; the movie is blessedly free of Hollywood's gratuitous romance and melodrama, mindless heroism, and closeups of beautiful bodies. Good musical score. Special effects are low-budget but mostly effective, with one glaring exception: frequent intercut images, a fraction of a second each, accompanied by a loud electrical sizzle-snap. Most are negative (color-reversed) versions of what we just saw or are about to see. The intercuts are meant to heighten the tension, and they do, but only a handful of the hundreds of them aid the story. The rest are cheap yanks on our startle response.I have two other small beefs. First, the movie uses news clips of recovery from actual volcanic eruptions, showing places and people that clearly aren't in North America. Those briefly, jarringly broke my suspension of disbelief. Second, an aerial view of what was supposed to be post-eruption Yellowstone was an ordinary scene of mountain country. What could have been a potent visual was unconvincing and disappointing.Supervolcano focuses on the human consequences of the super-eruption, on how helpless we are against the power of nature, and does so grippingly. I would have liked more of the perspective -- which is mentioned only in passing -- that we are a minuscule part of the drama of creation, and that there is grandeur even in our own extinction. Still, Supervolcano is a powerful reminder to be humble about our place in the universe, a reminder we need regularly.Highly recommended.

Didn't expect too much from this docudrama but was very impressed by the science as well as being entertained by it as thriller/sci-fi.These days when people doubt that the Holocaust ever happened, or think that it is technically easy to destroy a clutch of incoming MIRVd ICBMs, such might discern little difference between SuperVolcano and The Day After Tomorrow (which bear some obvious similarities), but I found SV vastly more credible in concept than Day After.There IS a vast lava chamber under Yellowstone Park (as well as a dozen others in other parts of the world) which DOES have the potential to erupt in a continent and world devastating way, as a SuperVolcano. It has erupted at least twice in the past, roughly every 600,000 years and is statistically due for another eruption "about now". Of course with a timescale uncertainty of some ± 100,000 years, one is rightly skeptical about it blowing next week, but SV dealt with even this aspect of the event in a convincing way. The inevitable doubts - "it couldn't possibly..." - ultimately had to give way to what Nature was actually doing. At that point, denying what was happening amounted simply to a cover-up and cost many lives.I liked the frequent cutaways to scientists' giving informed opinions/facts about the event. The other big uncertainty in the event, as to how devastating it will be, is the nature of the lava in the chamber. Is it sufficiently fluid to be "eruptible"? At present we simply do not know. Perhaps in a few hundred years (assuming the planet is still habitable and that anything at all matters), technology will have advanced to the point where all these questions can be answered, the eruption's timing and impact can be accurately predicted and appropriate measures taken to minimise destruction, or maybe even to stop it from happening at all.10/10

Mild Spoiler Alert!!!The first wrong note this speculative drama started with was the ridiculous holographic display. The excuse that this was set in "the near future" doesn't work as everything else in the film is exactly as they are today. Then an unusual number of British actors appeared in roles that should have been casted to American actors. That probably doesn't make much of a difference to the non-English speaking backers of this film. Then we get inserted "interviews" like they do in those crime re-creation shows. The writing is frequently not very good and the actors were suffering for it. The shock edit techniques got tiresome early on. One actor seemed to have been instructed to imitate Mr. Scott from Star Trek. The whole thing was getting like those bad made-for-TV movies on the Sci-Fi Channel here. I was ready to find something else to watch.Then the first eruption happens and suddenly the film take a good turn. It gets very tense and urgent. The tone changes for the better and stays that way until about 10 minutes before the end when the film loses focus again.The science is much better than anything out of the Hollywood disaster machine lately. But that really isn't much to be proud of. Just turning by on the Weather Channel after the film was premiered, you could easily see that if a similar event happened just then, the outcome would be much different. Most of the ash would be deposited in Cannda, not that that wouldn't be with out it's own set of problems for the world.By the end I was wondering what the point of it all was. I had the strange feeling that this was all some sort of British fantasy about the lousy yanks getting their just desserts. Sort of like how "Rocky" was really a white boys revenge fantasy on African Americans. Or the many Hollywood films of the 1980's and 90's where the black character is killed off halfway thru the film as a subtle way to tell African-Americans that it wasn't a good idea to be heroic or try to be successful. Interestingly, something like this happens in Supervolcano when the ONLY black character in the film is killed by the volcano.On a technical note, the film was shown in a 3 hour time slot with plenty of commercial breaks and a 30 minute mini-documentary hosted by Tom Brokaw. I assume that nothing was cut.