A great and possibly underappreciated genre of the 1990s. I would've included Outbreak, but it didn't fit neatly in my 3 x 3 arrangement. Titanic is too epic and too well done to count. Jurassic Park, same. Apollo 13... meh. It doesn't have the cheesiness that these do. Waterworld just sucks. The Rock is pretty fringe for this list.
FIRESTORM is hilariously terrible, and I haven't seen it in years, except that I remember it features an awesome jailbreak at the beginning, and Howie Long just kicks the fuck out of people, while DAYLIGHT is... also terrible, except in a less comic fashion, because Stallone is just an atrocious actor and not an inspirational guy, considering he can barely enunciate 10 words of the English language, and DANTE'S PEAK has all the right pacing and plot ingredients that comprise a good, cheesy disaster flick, except the special effects make the movie look like a 7th grader's science project.
GODZILLA suffers terribly from immediately being relegated to being a worse JURASSIC PARK when it was released, and now falling off the earth completely now that CLOVERFIELD completely destroys it in every fashion, and yet I will still tune in when it is on TV, because monsters in a city is win, and yet I am even guiltier of this offense when it comes to ARMAGEDDON, because the cast is just a veritable 90s dream team, and Michael Bay, while he has a horrible penchant for needlessly extending his films beyond the 150-minute mark and inserting random state-of-the-art tech just for the hell of it, is frankly awesome, but all the while DEEP IMPACT is just ARMAGEDDON but worse in every single way, in that it stars an utterly unbelievable Morgan Freeman as President and tries to create sympathetic characters out of a bitchy Tea Leoni, a senile Robert Duvall, and a totally in-over-his-head Elijah Wood.
VOLCANO is essentially a twin of DANTE'S PEAK, as noted most aptly by Seth Rogen in KNOCKED UP, and yet it is continually watchable, because Tommy Lee Jones is a very sympathetic character and Anne Heche the same, and it delivers on some decent-to-OK special effects for a 1997 flick, but all the same, it does not match up with TWISTER, which is, for all intents and purposes, the silver to ID4's gold, in that it features a semi-believable relationship between Paxton and Hunt, and pre-fame Philip Seymour Hoffman is hilarious, and it deserves a top spot if for no other reason than the brilliant drive-thru scene with THE SHINING, and yet it still falls short of the aforementioned INDEPENDENCE DAY, which somehow, despite being made in 1996, still looks decent today, a testament not only to the special effects, not only to Will Smith's tough-meets-immature black guy role, and not only to Bill Pullman's amazing speech, but to Jeff Goldblum's enduring and amusing nature, as "must go faster!" is not only one of the key lines in two of the biggest 90s films (this and JURASSIC PARK), but it was uttered both times by JG.
