Twisters is their heir: a look back at 5 great disaster films of the 1990s

Before you go chasing tornadoes tonight on 6ter, here is a selection of some of the best disaster movies of this decade.

While the Twisters of Lee Isaac Chung arrives in theaters, 6ter chooses to broadcast its predecessor, the Twister of Jan de Bont released in 1996, tonight at 9:10 p.m. The opportunity for First to return to the nineties and their penchant for disasters of all kinds in an anthology (non-exhaustive and chronological) of nuggets, popular and less popular, of this sub-genre of action, which has seen more than the seven plagues of Egypt fall upon our world.

Alert !Wolfgang Petersen (1995)

Wolfgang Petersen accomplished Alert ! (Outbreak in English) two years before Air Force One and infuses it with the same casting effort. Dustin Hoffman, Rene Russo, Morgan Freeman, Kevin Spacey, Donald Sutherland And Cuba Gooding Jr. give each other the cue in this film with an invisible threat, the stakes of which we will find in the Contagion of Steven Soderbergh some fifteen years later. While a devastating virus (Motaba, worse than Ebola) resurfaces after several decades of dormancy, transported from the African continent to the United States via a monkey, the government wants to drop a bomb on the contaminated town to stop the epidemic. Or when Man becomes more dangerous than an ultra-contagious disease for his peers in a plot full of inconsistencies essential to its charm.

Independence DayRoland Emmerich (1996)

At the beginning of his film career, Will Smith appears in Independence Day: The Day of Responsea movie of Roland Emmerich which he shares the bill with Bill Pullman And Jeff Goldblum. Here, the danger comes from elsewhere, and takes the form of flying saucers piloted by small (large) green (grey) men who don't look particularly benevolent. Half disaster movie, half alien movie, Independance Day has become a cult classic, and it owes this as much to its sequences, each more spectacular than the last (the disintegration of the White House, that of the Empire State Building, the opening of the alien ship, the aerial guerrilla warfare), as to its not very subtle plot devices (we remember the metaphor of chess) and its assumed references to science fiction classics, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Alien And Star Wars in the lead. In short, an uncompromising film, which is not afraid to touch on what is most sacred in America. Normal, it is directed by a German.

TwisterJan de Bont (1996)

In Genesis, Noah saves a pair of cows from the Flood, in Twister, Jan de Bont makes them fly. “We got cows!” Melissa's character is written. A psychologist by profession, she was dragged into the heart of a storm by her fiancé, Bill Harding (Bill Paxton), who came to have his ex-partner, Jo Thornton () sign the divorce papersHelen Hunt), which has only one goal in mind: to test the effectiveness of Dorothy, a device for studying tornadoes. With a scenario written by Michael Crichton And Spielberg to production, Twister is at the forefront of what can be done in the 1990s in terms of visual effects. The proof? An Oscar nomination for Best Special Effects in 1997.

VolcanoMick Jackson (1997)

The City of Angels turns into a veritable hell when a volcano grows ready to spew torrents of lava onto its population, which is nevertheless accustomed to extreme heat. Tommy Lee Jones plays Mike Roark, the director of the city's Office of Emergency Management, and a resigned father (there always needs to be one in this kind of film). With Amy (Anne Heche), a young whistleblower scientist, he takes on the (impossible) mission of stopping this apocalypse. Enough to give Jones an aura of a hero as hot as embers, and Mick Jacksonthe director, the opportunity to definitively turn the somewhat too saccharine page of Bodyguardwhich saw the birth of a romance between Whitney Houston And Kevin Costner five years earlier.

ArmageddonMichael Bay (1998)

It is impossible to make such a ranking without mentioning Armageddonwhose title, a biblical reference, designates the place of the last battle between the forces of Good and Evil during the Last Judgment. A fatal metonymy, it is used to add a little fatalistic credit to this film with a more than improbable scenario and whose suspense lies in the expectation of the annihilation of the Earth by an asteroid the size of Texas. Proactive waiting because NASA decides to send a handful of oil drillers there led, in this suicide mission, by a Bruce Willis (who else?) messianic. A masterpiece of a disaster movie that concentrates all the contradictions of a genre we love to hate, with four Oscar nominations (Best Sound, Best Visual Effects, Best Sound Editing, Best Original Song) and a Razzie Award for Willis.

Does Twisters have any breath? [critique]