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There was a modern-day resurgence of disaster films, beginning in the mid-1990s. The sub-genre was really revived at this time with the emergence of advanced special effects techniques. The focus of such films is on the spectacular calamity and a small group of people in imminent danger, and how they must cope or devise a method of escape, or more recently, to survive in the apocalyptic aftermath. Disaster films from the recent past and present have included similar and more imaginative kinds of catastrophes (or threats of disaster), such as killer viruses, deadly terrorists, tornadoes, asteroid impacts, ecological disasters.
Arthur discusses the significance of Hollywood’s recent disaster-oriented movies.
Both movies about alien invasion and natural cataclysms are related to how Hollywood conceives its relationship to advanced technology at any given time or, more suggestively, how it allegorizes its own fate as an industry when faced with competing representational or image-delivery systems. Although given impetus by the upcoming millennium, and the pressures and compensations of the worldwide marketplace, the recent spate of movies can be symbolically linked to the destruction of traditional studio dynamics by digital imaging and to the pervasiveness of cable television (Arthur, 1998: 72).
Belmont, Cynthia reports on the ways in which women have been portrayed in natural disaster films since the 1990s. The author feels that disaster films are popular due to the ways in which they represent conceptions of gender, the military and the roles of humans in the environment. Seven films including Mimic, Deep Blue Sea and Volcano, are discussed.