By Mary Shaffer
and Jerry Bunin
Telegram-Tribune

Spectacular special effects have made movies worse not better.

Far too much of the film industry seems convinced audiences will be satisfied by movies where the only creativity and most of the money went into pyrotechnic explosions and marketing hype.

Hollywood spent from $70 million to more than $100 million each on "Volcano," "Jurassic Park: The Lost World," "Con-Air," "Speed 2: Cruise Control," "Face/Off," and "Air Force One," and as much as $200 million on "Titanic" due in December.

These big budget, summer/disaster movies pack the excitement of a roller coaster ride and the substance of cotton candy. For two or more hours, they replace character, plot, dialogue and ideas with clichés, stereotypes, and mindless action. As films, they resemble computer simulations more than movies with a story to follow and characters to care about.

"Face/Off," for example, wastes an intriguing premise and cast (led by Oscar-winner Nicolas Cage and Oscar-nominee John Travolta) on tedious, repetitive, violent, and implausible shoot-outs.

"Lost World" spent $73 million creating fabulously realistic-looking dinosaurs only to put them in a two-bit plot filled with stupid scientists, silly villains and a ludicrous ending.

It doesn't have to be this way. You can rent videos of great movies about disasters that find real drama in stories about how ordinary people react to extraordinary events.

Director Ron Howard didn't let special effects get in the way of telling a good story in "Apollo 13" (1995), his gripping, Oscar-nominated film about America's first disaster in space.

Howard convincingly recreates the ill-fated mission in which three astronauts faced the very real possibility of being stranded and dying in space.

The effects are amazing. The rocket launch, outer space and the tension-filled landing seem absolutely real, although every scene is movie magic. No actual NASA footage was used.

But the film's power is its story of how the astronauts, their families, and the ground crew bring the crippled ship home. This is an exciting, moving, and satisfying human drama.

"Alive" (1993) is an equally terrific film, not because it shows a spectacular plane crash, but because it is an incredible tale of human survival.

The film tells the true story of a young South American rugby team stranded in the remote, snow-covered Andes Mountains. The spectacular and terrifying plane crash occurs in the film's first 15 minutes, but the drama continues for 70 days as the survivors endure freezing cold, sudden avalanches, and starvation.

But their biggest obstacle is a moral one: the devout Catholics must decide whether or not to cannibalize their dead in order to stay alive and find a way down the mountain.

Cannibalizing one plane to build another is the key to survival in "The Flight of the Phoenix" (1966). The crash in the Arabian desert occurs early on, leaving the film to focus on the moral, physical, and emotional conflicts among the survivors.

The set-up seems predictable at first: men from various walks of life thrown together by circumstance. But superior writing, directing, and acting (including the late James Stewart) expose complex and flawed characters in a plot that turns in unexpected ways before the Phoenix tries to rise again.

Alfred Hitchcock manages something similar with "Lifeboat" (1944) by focusing on the interactions of a handful of survivors of a German U-Boat attack on their ship.

Tension develops when they rescue the German captain and are forced to compete for control of the boat and their fates.

In the context of World War II, Hitchcock uses the lifeboat as a microcosm to comment on the larger social and political world.

But even more impressive, he creates suspense and complicated characters and relationships without showing a ship sinking and without ever leaving the raft.

"Lifeboat," like all these films, builds tension by creating characters worth caring about and a story worth telling, a simple premise too many filmmakers seem to have forgotten these days.

Mary Shaffer works at Cal Poly. Jerry Bunin is Internet Editor for the Telegram-Tribune.

Filmmography

• "San Francisco" (1936)
• "Titanic" (1953)
• "The High and the Mighty" (1954)
• "Abandon Ship!" (1957)
• "A Night to Remember" (1958)
• "Fate is the Hunter" (1964)
• "Sands of the Kalahari" (1965)
• "The Red Tent" (1971)
• "Testament" (1983)
• "Runaway Train" (1985)
• "Fearless" (1993)