Cinematic 'Twisters' in the Boston Harbour

This evening I left the computer, for a brief while, then was 'hooked' on a film that my parents were watching.

While we were in Canada, the American channel TBS would offer films in which rattlesnakes settled a town despite the efforts of Harry Hamlin, limestone crumbled into great sinkholes in New Orleans during Mardi Gras, and Tommy Lee Jones ended a lava eruption through the might of explosives.

Generally I turned away whenever anybody died.

On German TV, there are evidently thrillers, too: windstorms stretching west to east and flooding Las Vegas with desert sand, grasshoppers who ate flesh, supervolcanoes emerging from the entirety of Yellowstone National Park, and killer bees in a loftier film with Gabriel Byrne.

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In any case, this time the film investigated the likelihood that a volcanic eruption might trigger a disruption in the upper atmosphere, firing ozone up where it freezes and forms aggregate rocks with carbon dioxide, maybe, and then sucking them down again in waterspouts that end up approaching the Boston Harbour.

The waterspouts fling off the boulders as they twirl. These thrust through the air as if fired from a rocket launcher, to flatten Bostonians like flies or tip them over like ninepins. — The idea of 'amusing' deaths wasn't all that amusing, but then the level of plausibility was kept firmly in the fictional realm in any case. — Rather than resting idle on the ground (wafting a vapour) after their feats, and to heighten interest, these earth-meteors are then liable to be tempted by the higher air pressure into blasting athwart.

A few things were striking.


I think there weren't any African Americans or other visible minorities, there wasn't an inkling of the Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority; the waterspouts evidently hated Boston in particular even though the entire Eastern Seaboard was at their disposal. As filmic Boston fulfills its evacuations in a jiffy, however, it was kinder to assail that locale rather than a realistic, sluggardly metropolis, though if the windspouts had frequented a deserted island or national park it would not have been amiss. There were no weather buoys or vagrant vessels to catch the windspeeds out on the water, it appeared. I've rarely seen a littler flotilla of sailboats at a marina for millions of people; and the waterspouts' CGI was, as far as I can tell, a little more primitive than its early rivals in Twister.

Lastly, the policewoman always drove without a partner in her car and had a magnificently generous schedule. Also, the NOAA is headquartered in Maryland rather than Massachusetts. Since it was renamed FOA anyway, I guess that's irrelevant though.

EVEN the finest films might err to the pedantic mind, and I felt that the effect was Boston-y anyway.

(The dubbing ruined the likelihood of judging Bostonian accents; and, perhaps, of ascertaining whether the gentility index of the film extras reflected the famed flavour of the town.)

AFTER enjoying the campiness and its highly familiar take on the tensions between earnest emergency personnel, or earth scientists, and the whiny half-orphaned children who feel that natural disasters are their live parent's first love; the imagery of the city of Boston (skyline, swan boats, Plymouth Rock, 'Harvard' and all); etc. — I discovered that it was, in fact, filmed in Victoria.

It was constructed well enough that neither my parents nor I had recognized a thing. Much later this morning I read the review of Godzilla (2014) in the New Yorker, and feel that it was a fine partner to that film, indirectly.

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(Specific name of film withheld so as not to cast direct aspersions on anyone's hard work, as opposed to the genre in general.)