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Dante's Peak (1997)
8
RecommendedDirected by Roger Donaldson· 108 min· 5 min read
My Review
Dante’s Peak is a 1997 disaster film directed by Roger Donaldson and written by Leslie Bohem, running 109 minutes. Pierce Brosnan plays Harry Dalton, a USGS volcanologist sent to a small town in the Washington Cascades to investigate seismic activity, with Linda Hamilton as Rachel Wando, the town’s mayor, and Charles Hallahan as Harry’s sceptical superior.
This is peak nineties cinema. End of the world movies really did pop off differently back then, and this is a prime example of why.
Yes, some scenes have genuinely poor green screen work, and that has not improved with age. But a great deal of it felt real to me, as though they had actually built things and filmed them with miniatures or something along those lines.
And that is precisely what happened. The visual effects here were a hybrid approach, supervised by Patrick McClung at Digital Domain, combining extensive miniatures and full-scale practical explosions with the emerging digital tools of the time. The volcano itself in the wide shots is a combination of miniatures and matte paintings. The film was nominated for awards specifically in the categories of Best Models and Miniatures and Best Miniature Pyrotechnics. The volcanic ash was largely newspaper shavings, and the production pumped real ash clouds into the sky to shoot against. The miniature work on the river and bridge sequence in particular was described at the time as among the most convincing ever put on screen.
There is a reason the film was made this way, and I genuinely love it. Roger Donaldson was a geology student before he became a filmmaker, and that background is what drew him to the script in the first place. He deliberately patterned the volcano on Mount St Helens, consulted scientists throughout production, and made a conscious choice to favour practical effects over computer-generated ones. That decision is why the film has aged considerably better than it had any right to.
Pierce was young and Bond-like in this, which turns out to be funnier than I realised while watching. Dante’s Peak was released in February 1997, placing it directly between GoldenEye in 1995 and Tomorrow Never Dies later that same year. He was not Bond-like. He was the sitting James Bond, taking a short break to climb a volcano.
Linda Hamilton as the mayor was the other adjustment. It is weird seeing her not trying to fight a robot. She is good in it, though the film does hand her a slightly improbable workload, since she is simultaneously the mayor, the sole employee of a café and hardware store, and a mother of two.
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Reviewed on October 23, 2026
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