Esotropiart

Has anyone noticed that there has been a long string of disaster movies (natural or unnatural) in the last several years? I find it strange to see Hollywood pump out so many movies with virtually the same plot. I mean there's "Twister", "Independence Day", "The Perfect Storm", "Armageddon", "Volcano", "Deep Impact", "The Core", "Dante's Peak", "Towering Inferno", and this "The Day After Tomorrow". It seems that once movie makers realized there was money to be made from such movies, they just started pumping them out, with little concern for being repetitious.

The plot of these movies is almost always very similar and will have several or all of the following features:

• The entire world is being threatened, or at least a million lives
• There is a random actor playing the president of the United States
• Either the president or one of his aides is a dork and doesn't pay any attention to warnings from the scientific community
• There is one primary scientist who knows everything and can create relatively accurate computer models/simulations that should be used by local weather stations
• There are tiny, cheesy cameos of what's happening in other parts of the world, but the entire movie is set in the United States, and that's all that matters
• Someone from the United States is almost always the hero
• All the characters that are set up to be annoying people with faults or minor characters die (often by sacrificing their life for a main character), while most of the important main characters miraculously live
• Even if the United States is utterly destroyed, somehow it remains the world's only super power, and everyone looks to it for guidance and direction
• A band of super smart, super tough, or completely random people goes on a quest to save the world
• At least one guy and one girl in the band of heroes (if not 2 or three pairs) end up being romantically involved
• There is inevitably some super gadget machine that will save the entire planet from destruction
• The warning signals of impending doom are always ignored until the very last second, when everyone pulls together to come up with a genius plan that always works
• At least one part of the plan has to go completely wrong, leaving no possible hope for the earth once more... but then the heroes complete their task anyway, often by leaving one of their members behind to die a hero

Well, there's my attempt to form a list of elements common to most of these natural disaster movies. I'm sure the list could have been twice as long. Though "The Day After Tomorrow" was more-or-less just another one of these same plot movies, I enjoyed it. Being the visual guy I am, I generally enjoy a movie with cool special effects. I always wish I could have gone to school to learn more of the whole 3D animation industry. I know a tad bit just from my own experiments. To see how far they have come and to watch the stunning results in movies(or in video games), I feel hopeless to jump into learning such things, so I move on with my life.