To hear Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson tell it, disaster movies are limited to cinematic run-ins with Mother Nature. Specifically, because his latest movie Rampage involves mutations to his gorilla friend George, he considers it a monster movie.
Speaking from the movie’s set in Atlanta, Johnson said, “Well, let me take a stab at this. From my experience, the difference between a disaster movie and a monster movie is [in] one you’re dealing with Mother Nature—very unpredictable—the other you’re dealing with mutated monsters, which are unpredictable, but at the same time, one was a best friend of mine, someone who I treated like my brother or my kid.”
Hmmm. Much as we love you, Mr. Johnson, we here at TheDisasterArea beg to differ. Certainly there are the universes of monster-only movies (Dracula and Frankenstein, for example) and disaster-only movies (such as Twister and Towering Inferno). However, there are many, MANY movies with a foot in both, just two examples of which are every last entry in the Godzilla and Sharknado franchises.
Johnson went on to say, “What I’m finding as we move along and we’re shooting these scenes is that, unlike with San Andreas, we had time between earthquakes. We have a sense that something was coming, that something else was coming, the big one was going to happen. We had a little bit of time. In this, with three gigantic monsters—especially at their height of the (mutating) serum taking effect—there’s no time and everything happens very quickly, and everything’s happening from different angles.”
Again, the fact that humans are dealing with a crisis—regardless of timing—is a defining characteristic of both disaster AND monster movies. Case closed.
So we eagerly await the release of Johnson’s disaster-monster-video-game-adaptation movie Rampage on April 13, and his straight disaster movie Skyscraper on July 13. In the meantime, we’ll rewatch his Mother Nature disaster movie, San Andreas. He really can do it all, can’t he?
Image: Warner Bros.
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