Natural Disasters: Forces of Nature

The IMAX screen gives us a close-up look at three varieties of natural disasters: volcanoes, earthquakes and tornadoes—the most potentially destructive and the hardest to predict. Over the solemn narration of Kevin Bacon, director George Casey and his National Geographic crew get some truly terrifying footage of the eruption of the Soufriere Hills volcano on the Caribbean island of Montserrat in 1996 (with thundering IMAX audio) and some almost-as-impressive shots of American tornadoes and the earthquake in Kismet, Turkey. The film also chronicles the various scientific efforts that go into studying these phenomena, with the aim of developing a reliable method of predicting them. After 45 minutes of Casey’s footage, it’s hard not to think that those predictions can’t come along any too soon.