Movies - Dante's Peak

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	Movies - Dante's Peak

Dante's Peak is a 1997 action-adventure film starring Pierce Brosnan and Linda Hamilton. It portrays the effect of a volcano erupting in a small town in the Pacific Northwest. It was released a few months before Volcano, another movie of the same disaster genre which did equally as well at the box office.

The film was actually credited by geologists for portraying the geological activities in the film fairly accurately.

The movie is set in the fictional town of Dante's Peak, Washington in the Cascade Range but was actually filmed in Wallace, Idaho, with the image of the volcano superimposed over the footage of the town (Wallace does not have a real volcano nearby). Based somewhat on the real-life eruption of Mount St. Helens in 1980 and the active status of other volcanoes in the Cascade range such as Mount Rainier, Dante's Peak depicts the efforts of a geologist to warn the townspeople about the impending eruption, and the subsequent efforts to rescue victims of the volcano including the family of the town's mayor.

Since the release of Dante's Peak, the "avalanche" part of the Universal Studios Backlot Tour has been redesigned to be a volcano and retitled "Dante's Peak."

Tagline: The pressure is building...

Cast

Pierce Brosnan
as Harry Dalton
Linda Hamilton
as Mayor Rachel Wando
Charles Hallahan
as Dr. Paul Dreyfus
Jamie Renée Smith as Lauren Wando
Jeremy Foley as Graham Wando

Trivia

A brief scene in the movie was actually shot inside the crater of Washington State's Mount St. Helens. Specifically, it is the scene where one of the scientists gets caught in a rockslide and breaks his leg while trying to climb down to repair a malfunctioning piece of scientific equipment inside the crater of the volcano. The giveaway of this shot is a brief appearance by Mount Adams, a somewhat extinct 12,776-foot-high peak 35 miles east of Mount St. Helens, just above the crater rim as the view tightens in on the scientists.

Mount St. Helens also makes an appearance at the very end of the movie. During the start of the closing credit crawl, the scene shows an image of a destroyed Dante's Peak community with the camera shot moving out to show a wider scene of disaster, and then showing what remains of the volcano itself. The volcano that remains is actually an image of Mount St. Helens taken from news footage taken just after the May 18, 1980 eruption.

Exteriors were also shot at the USGS's David A. Johnston Cascades Volcano Observatory headquarters in Vancouver, Washington. The facility was named in honor of David Johnston, a young scientist who had precisely predicted the volatility of the May 18, 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens. That eruption cost him his life.

[ Visit the complete Wikipedia entry for Dante's Peak ]

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