THE WAVE

"It was only a matter of time," the slogan on the movie poster reads, and the time has come. Presenting the faithful Norwegian rendering of DANTE'S PEAK, that old 1997 volcano movie with Pierce Brosnan and Linda Hamilton that to this day remains a MOVIEGOER guilty pleasure. So now we have THE WAVE, and the volcano has become a huge slice of a fjord wall in the Sunnmøre region of Norway, and the lava and pyroclastic flow has been replaced by, you guessed it, an impressive wall of water, giving the movie its name. The plot is point-for-point lifted right out of DANTE'S PEAK, and the characters who deserved, in terms of movie-justice, to die in DANTE'S PEAK, die here in THE WAVE too. The movie also feels like the original POSEIDON ADVENTURE. But you know what, the thing works. I thought it was a swell popcorn disaster/survival movie whose message is, LISTEN TO THE SCIENTIST, PLEASE, HE'S FIGURED IT OUT. Filmmakers sure do love scientist-as-Cassandra plotlines. This one's better than most. And hey, it has (fasten your seatbelts, Americans) subtitles. Which are rendered pretty readable most of the time, with the exception of when the characters are speaking their lines pretty quickly, and the subtitles can't keep up (or the moviegoer can't). So be prepared to miss some of the lines because they fire off pretty fast, but then, we've all seen this movie a dozen times over, so, it's all good. SCORE: 75.