|
|
|||||
|
|
|
| Krakatoa Review from The Independant Independant - 14th May 2006 Disaster movies are very fond of the blithe complacency: the obliging character who says "this ship is unsinkable" or berates the fire chief for alarmist talk that might frighten away the tourists. But there are occasions when you could hardly be blamed for feeling relatively relaxed about your safety. If the rumbling volcano is 30 miles away across open water, for example, you might reasonably think that you've got a dress-circle seat for the show but are secure from the ghastly prospect of audience involvement. That was what most of the people near Krakatoa assumed in 1883, even, if we are to believe Krakatoa - the Last Days, the locals who were shown watching a shadow-puppet disaster movie, in which the volcano god waved his little puppety arms and croaked: "Now they must learn what it is to earn the wrath of the spirit mountain!" What's also essential to a disaster movie is the Cassandra whose warnings are ignored, in this case Johanna Beijerinck, the wife of the Dutch administrator at Katimbang a town that took the brunt of the explosion, first in the form of a devastating tsunami and then, a little later, in the form of pyroclastic flow, which rode across the water on a hovercraft of superheated steam. You remember pyroclastic flow. It was the star in Pompeii - the Last Day, the first of the BBC's CGI blockbusters, and had a cameo role in Super volcano. It's very photogenic, pyroclastic flow: it blossomed over the pine trees like some deadly screensaver, though it was edged out by rather good ash fall. As usual in these things, the visual effects were fairly impressive, but you couldn't help wondering whether the victims would have followed the disaster-movie rules of behaviour quite so closely. Did Johanna and her husband, Willem, really react to the loudest noise ever recorded in history by going into one of those urgent, open-mouthed snogs that are a Hollywood staple? Was the lighthouse keeper's wife really saved by going off to look for an errant dog? And did Roger Verbeek, the Dutch vulcanologist who wrote the first scientific account of the explosion, really react to the initial rumbles by shouting, "Coffee... we'll need some coffee!", and ripping textbooks from the shelves like Van Helsing looking for a garlic recipe? If the BBC1 drama was Krakatoa for Dummies, BBC2's Krakatoa Revealed was the Open University version, with a lot of scientists having Boy's Own-style fun in pursuit of the truth. A British vulcanologist built a sandcastle Krakatoa and then blew it up with a compressor hose (an instructive bit of creative play, as it happened). Meanwhile, another vulcanologist dropped superheated ash into a wave chamber to demonstrate how it might have crossed the Sunda Strait. The firm conclusion seemed to be that pyroclastic flow had caused the tsunami, rather than the collapse of the mountain, as had been assumed previously. Which raised another question about Krakatoa - the Last Days. If pyroclastic flow travels at more than 100mph, then how come the Beijerincks were hit by the tsunami first, and then had five or six hours to walk inland before being blowtorched by heated ash? Whatever the case, I'm glad I watched this in north London, rather than in Yogyakarta in Central Java, which has a ringside seat for the ongoing eruption of Mount Merapi. That might be complacent of me. Krakatoa - the Last Days had mocked up its sepia photograph, which was a pity, since I would have liked to see if the real Johanna and Willem really were colonial eye candy, as Olivia Williams and Rupert Penry- Jones effectively made them. In Friday's The Iron Coffin - Timewatch, the historical photographs of American Civil War ironclads were real, and delivered a thrilling historical short circuit. Two skeletons had been found in the gun turret of the sunken Monitor, and this film followed attempts to put a name to them. One of the skulls had a pipe groove in his front teeth, a semicircular notch worn away by a clay-pipe stem. And when they cut to shots of the crew posing on the deck, there was just one sailor with a pipe gripped in his teeth. Timewatch never categorically stated that the face and the skull belonged to the same man, but they didn't get in your way when you jumped to conclusions. If I Had You fantasised about what might happen if a detective inspector had an inadmissible emotional connection with the chief suspect in a murder case. In the course of doing this, it also fantasised that all laws of psychological plausibility were suspended, that the banal friction of institutional life did not exist and that a guilty conscience announces its presence with facial mugging worthy of silent melodrama. Not sure what the conditional conjunction in the title had to do with anything, but if I had back the time I spent watching it, I would be feeling less grumpy. (c) 2006 Independent, The; London (UK). Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved. Copyright 2006 Independent | ||