![[Cast of Dante's Peak]](dantew.jpg)
The mayor, a cafe owner and single mom played with earthy intensity by Linda Hamilton, knows that jittery reports from the visiting volcanologist might jeapordize her hard-won plans for economic development. 
No, this is not just "Twister" with lava; director Roger Donaldson ("Smash Palace," "No Way Out") instead confounds skeptics by showing as much care for his characters as for his spectacular effects, thereby shaping the most skillful, satisfying disaster movie Hollywood has yet made.
In a suitably eerie prologue in South America, an intrepid researcher (Pierce Brosnan, in unusually sympathetic form) escapes from an exploding volcano but loses his fiancee in the process.
Four years later, still haunted by the experience, strange seismic measurements draw him to a picturesque Cascades Mountain village, proud of the majestic, snow-packed "Dante's Peak" towering over the town.
The mayor, a cafe owner and single mom played with earthy intensity by Linda Hamilton, knows that jittery reports from the visiting volcanologist might jeapordize her hard-won plans for economic development.
Nevertheless, a friendship develops as Hamilton and Brosnan display chemistry nearly as combustible as the worrying rumbles and sulfurous emissions from the mountaintop.
Tension builds gradually, stressing the idyllic beauty of the pre-eruption village, rather than instantly clobbering the audience with non-stop special effects. As a result, when the otherworldy dazzlements begin assaulting the senses (and characters we care about) halfway through the movie, the impact is truly awesome.
Some of the imagery, relying in part on superbly detailed computer graphics, is unforgettable: floods from melted glaciers sweeping away forests, dams and bridges; gas clouds exploding with the force of a million atom bombs (as with previous real-life eruptions), a formerly tranquil mountain lake suddenly turned to a deadly sea of acid, battered trucks driving across cooling lava fields as tires explode into flame.
Unlike other movies of this type, there's no tongue-in-cheek winking or nudging to break the tension, even though Donaldson does surrender to one of the most obnoxious conventions of disaster movies: it's understandable why you need threatened kids and old ladies, but was it really necessary to throw in the lost dog?
All complaints are finally overwhelmed by the movie's thrills, with superior acting and flawless pacing as bonuses you'd hardly expect in this sort of fare. In any event, "Dante's Peak" is easily powerful enough to insure that you'll never again look at lava lamps the same way.
