![]() ![]() Which isn’t very interesting, no matter how many of Hollywood’s most bankable stars are involved. The movie is a connect-the-dot sheet of soap opera tropes, hoping to get away with such unoriginality with an incendiary backdrop. Its characters are written only in clichés - even one-off mouth pieces in an episode of The Twilight Zone (1959-64) have more depth - and when the explosions do briefly let up from time to time, mawkish, blandly melodramatic subplots (mostly romances Roy Lichtenstein might have lapped up ) burgeon. But it's too eager to please.Īs a repercussion of being infatuated with setting various objects and people alight, glass shattered and fire hoses drained once in a while to cleanse our palates, its creators, here director John Guillermin, producer Allen, and screenwriter Stirling Silliphant, forget to make a movie able to hold our attention for more than two minutes at a time. And she’s not wrong: While Airport and Poseidon were agreeably hokey and fortunately not all that aspirational, The Towering Inferno, nearing three hours, puts all its drive into its special effects (which do regularly astonish) and its need to make us want to exasperatedly shout “now what?” every couple minutes. “The picture practically stops for us to say, ‘Yummy, that’s a good one!’” Pauline Kael wrote of The Towering Inferno for The New Yorker in 1974. Are we really expected to be diverted watching many perfectly nice people die, watching so many feel relief for a couple moments only to throw another hurdle toward them when their guard’s down? There’s an unsettling sort of glee that underscores the genre, as if the makers get off on devising new ways to kill off, or at least injure and dirty, top actors. But in most cases are disaster movies slightly - and disconcertingly - torture porny. It also understood that it was essentially a cheap thrill given a big budget. ![]() The Poseidon Adventure (1972) was a nerve-wracking, masterfully scary exploit, working mostly because it stuck with the journey of a single group and watched them try to make it to the end of the movie alive. Sometimes such excursions can be entertaining. For hours upon hours do we witness terrified characters attempt to overcome whatever calamity is hurled at them. These pictures are not much more than a long series of unfortunate events. Audiences would flock to witness the spectacle. Dependably, overpaid talents were pitted against unthinkable catastrophes, such as an overturned cruise ship, a collapsing high-rise, and even a vengeful swarm of bees.
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