Volcano / YMMV - TV Tropes

Anvilicious:
- The film has a message about working together in the face of a crisis, but it's put in some of the bluntest terms, including an adorable little boy pointing out how everyone looks the same from the volcano ash after the eruption.
- The not-so-subtle jab that building a subway in Los Angeles is wrong. A pretty common moral in movies from the 1990s, especially those made by people from Beverly Hills.
Awesome Music:
- "Build a Wall" and "March of the Lava", by Alan Silvestri.
- Also “I Love L.A.” by Randy Newman in the end credits.
Designated Villain: Stan Olber, chairman of the MTA. He’s made out to be the bad guy due to the fact he proceeds with the subway trains remaining on schedule despite the warnings from both Mike and Amy that something suspicious is brewing but he was in his right to keep the trains on schedule and also because MTA doesn’t answer to the City of Los Angeles. Still, he redeems himself admirably later on, showing his much more heroic colors as he leads a rescue team into the tunnel to get to a stricken train, then sacrifices himself to save someone else.
Don't Shoot the Message: Well, sure, racial tension in a crisis is going to make things worse and working together is a good moral. Just using a popcorn action movie with those themes feeling very tacked on probably wasn't the best way to go about it.
Esoteric Happy Ending: The movie ends with an active volcano in the middle of Los Angeles. It's going to cost untold amounts of money just to keep the city remotely functional, assuming the place isn't abandoned entirely.
Fridge Logic: Too many instances to count (though the Artistic License – Geology at the top of the main page helps), but when the firemen and cops all start cheering out, 'WOOT, we just stopped the lava pouring down the middle of main street!" So, uh, what about the dozens of side-streets that it's obviously been flowing down as well?
Ham and Cheese: Chief Sindelar of the LAPD only has about 15 lines in the film total and we never see him, but he doesn’t waste time taking the little dialogue he has and making it bombastic and unintentionally hilarious.
Harsher in Hindsight: The conflict between Jasper and Kevin. The former is clearly supposed to be a racist cop, and he comes across as one, and is consistently shown antagonizing Kevin. They end up burying the hatchet a bit when Jasper asks fire engines to help out Kevin's neighborhood. This is quite sweet and is clearly a reference to the then-contemporary issue with Rodney King, and put a hopeful spin on police-civilian relations, but real life would go in this direction as seen in the 2020s with the increasing volatility and exposure of police brutality against minorities, especially in the wake of the deaths of Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, and Amir Locke. In fact, all of what has happened in the climate of attitudes towards police can make Jasper and Kevin's conflict seem and look much more like a simple personal dispute between two individuals.
Narm:
- The newscaster who is just so proud of herself in the face of the advancing tide of lava. "We now have a name for this phenomenon — a 'volcano'." Also, Mike doesn't know that the advancing tide of lava is called lava, even if he knows what lava conceptually is.
- "Ah. Dad hurry. My leg is burning."
- The random man on Stanley Avenue calmly watering his plants in full view of the audience as if it were another sunny day as the reporter describes a scene of chaos unfolding in front of him.
- See any of the many, many instances of Artistic License on the front page.
- Stan melting like an ice sculpture when he lands in the lava may bring back memories of The Wizard of Oz.
- The little boy who plays Rock Paper Scissors with Kelly. Kelly mistakes his hand for paper, but the little boy informs her that it's lava and asks 'what beats that?'. This boy looks around four years old.
  - And to top it off, Kelly responds with "My dad."
- Near the end of the movie as a geyser of lava erupts from the streets, people at a news station are seen reacting to this. One African-American woman in a brown shirt and brown jacket reacts in a way that many people would find funny.
Retroactive Recognition:
- Valente Rodriguez, best known for his role as Ernie in The George Lopez Show, plays the subway conductor that Stan eventually saves from the lava flow.
- A pre-Marvel Don Cheadle is featured prominently as Roarke's coworker and friend, Emmett.
  - Kevin Feige got his start in Hollywood as producer Lauren Shuler Donner's assistant for this film.
Ron the Death Eater: Kelly does have Too Dumb to Live moments as expected for a child character, but to say that she was the one responsible for the deaths of the firemen is a major stretch. Viewers seem to miss that she did notice the lava and fearfully start to walk away from it, only to be trapped by a lava bomb that squirted lava on her leg (which should have killed her) in seconds after landing, trapping her. It was not like she actually did anything that was unreasonable for a 13-year-old suddenly facing down lava. If anything, Roarke was the idiotic one for even leaving her alone, and it was impressive that this girl didn't break down from the stress of this.
Rooting for the Empire: Many people wanted the lava to win. Probably because of the cheesy dialogue and general silliness of the plot.
The Scrappy: Kelly. So. Very. Much, even for "kid in a disaster movie" standards. You may find yourself wishing that someone would just put her into the lava, considering that she certainly does nothing to prevent herself from dying already and puts the lives of dozens of others at risk through her lethal idiocy.
Signature Scene: Stan's Cruel and Unusual Death is the main scene anyone remembers from this movie. Especially, people who watched it as kids and were thoroughly traumatized.
So Bad, It's Good: Narmtastic dialogue, Genre Blindness and Convection, Schmonvection all rolled into a cliche-ridden disaster movie. It's practically a perfect storm of elements for bad movie lovers. But the heroism aspects resonate even stronger after 9/11. Mike Nelson in his book Mike Nelson's Movie Megacheese compares it to an old war movie, saying it was "cornball, but with heart".
Special Effects Failure:
- There are points in the film where the lava may not exactly be convincing. Plus, the shot of an entire flotilla of helicopters swarming onscreen as they prepare to dump thousands of gallons of water on blocked lava flow is clearly just one too many helicopters duplicated into the same shot in too small an airspace for them all to function.
- In addition, there's almost too many instances to count where the footage was clearly slowed down, and shoddily slowed at that. The sudden frame rate drops cut between shots of normal movement make them all the more noticeable. In the opening shot, there's even an instance where the sweeping view of the city is obviously (and poorly) sped up.
Took the Bad Film Seriously: Tommy Lee Jones, Don Cheadle, Keith David and John Carroll Lynch seem to be the only ones who know that they’re in a disaster movie and they all act accordingly to the fact it is a disaster movie.
Unintentionally Unsympathetic: At the start of the film, a small/moderate earthquake happens to go off in LA. This makes main protagonist Roarke, who is divorced from his wife and is supposed to be off work for a week to spend it with her, go into work defying what the said to his ex-wife and his daughter. When his ex-wife calls and berates him, she's supposed to be annoying, but she ends up coming across as the more reasonable of the two given the context, especially since it's implied that he's done that before and is the reason for the divorce in the first place.
Unintentional Period Piece:
- The scene near the beginning with West Side and Beverly Hills residents protesting a subway expansion along Wilshire Blvd, along with the film's implication that the subway tunneling was what caused the Volcano in the first place is tied up in the Los Angeles politics of the 90's, since the then-under construction subway was a major hot-button issue at the time.
- The film's portrayal of racial tensions in post-Rodney King Los Angeles, particularly with the still strained relations between the African American community and the LAPD and the ending scene where the ash makes it impossible to tell the color of anybody's skin, mark it as a product of a period throughout most of the '90s when racial issues were at the forefront of national discussion.
- Also Kelly mentioning about touring OJ's house. The trial took place a couple years before the movie and was one of the most significant moments of the 20th century so it shouldn’t be a surprise that it was still a cultural phenomenon among many Angelenos.
Visual Effects of Awesome: The lava effects are impressive, holding up very well for a movie made in 1997.

YMMV / Volcano

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