The Volcano: Rescue from Whakaari

 The Volcano:  Rescue from Whakaari (2022, Rory Kennedy) is a morbid little documentary about people injured in the eruption of a New Zealand volcano.  The film is short, about 80 minutes.  No one would wish it any longer.  In large part, the movie is about trauma, serious burns, and, although the images are not particularly horrific, the film is disturbing and too unpleasant to be entertaining.  The Volcano is, more or less, pointless.  Netflix is a great open maw requiring constant infusions of content and Kennedy's movie is a place-holder -- it serves a purpose that, no doubt, Netflix understands with audience research calibrated down to fifty decimal points.  If you're tired or lazy and just want to rest your eyes on the TV for a hour or so of thoughtless diversion, a film like this (not requiring much in the way of audience commitment) will fit the bill.  It's companionable in a gruesome sort of way, not intellectually challenging, and you won't be outraged by anything you see -- the film doesn't traffic in indignation like most cable documentaries.  But Volcano is too grim for me to recommend it.

45 kilometers off the coast of New Zealand's north island, there's a stump of rock poking out of the ocean -- this is the stratovolcano of Whakaari ("White Island").  The volcano is like Aetna -- it is constantly leaking steam and fumes in a picturesque plume over a half-circle of cliffs that rise over a vitriol-green acid lake.  Before the lethal eruption, you could book excursions to the island -- tourists were shipped over to the island on tour-boats (and you could travel there by helicopter as well).  Once on the island, the tourists were led through a stinking, hellish landscape to a vantage overlooking the acid lake.  Visits lasted about 45 minutes walking to and from the overlook; the boat ride was ninety minutes one way.  The film assembles a group of witnesses who provide accounts of the events in which they were injured.  Several of them are visibly, and badly, scarred by their burns.  The movie is formulaic -- we meet the disparate group of people who will be caught up in the eruption and learn some background about the volcano.  There's a heavily tattooed Maori guy who provides perspective on the volcano's role in the local indigenous culture.  Some people are shown only by photographs and not interviewed -- this, of course, induces a guessing game in which the viewers try to figure out which of the visitors to the island will survive and which will die.  Two tour-boats land on the island and there are about 40 to 45 people on Whakaari when it erupts.  (There's also a helicopter with several visitors although the number of people associated with the flight to the volcanic island was never clear to me.)  One group of tourists have already embarked from the badly eroded concrete pier on the island, returning to the mainland, when the blast occurs.  The other group of tourists are near the acid lake.  The people on the boat aren't injured.  Their vessel returns to pick up the horribly scalded survivors who have somehow made their way down to the pier.  Some number of people too injured to make the trek to the sea remain staggering around on the lip of the acid lake.  The helicopter pilot outruns the pyroclastic cloud of steam and ash and saves himself by diving into the ocean and remaining underwater as long as possible -- he isn't injured.  The boats rush back to the harbor with their cargo of dead, dying, and severely injured tourists.  A fixed wing airplane circles the island looking for survivors.  Some  disabled people are seen on the ridge over the lake.  Two helicopter operators, defying orders from governmental authorities to stay off the island, land and try to pick up some victims.  It's not clear that anyone that they air-lift off the island survives due to their ghastly injuries.  The movie ends with some shots of the burn victims undergoing rehabilitation and therapy.  The tourists have been parboiled -- they are said to look like "boiled chickens" -- and, of course, most of them die in the hospital.  The film centers on a married couple, cooked together on their  honeymoon, and a young man too tough to die who was scalded on the ridge overlooking the lake -- his sister and parents all perished on the island.

Mercifully, Kennedy doesn't have too much relevant footage.  There's some blurry and chaotic cell-phone pictures shot on boats returning from Whakaari.  A few seconds show the eruption from the vantage of the tourists, but not surprisingly, we see white smoke, the landscape underfoot while someone is running, and, then, a reddish blur with the sounds of people screaming and moaning.  (There is a lot of screaming in this movie.)  Without much in the way of impressive footage, the film shows us picturesque shots of the volcano before it erupted, ominous drone imagery, and, then, wild hand-held sequences that look like something out of a Gaspar Noe picture -- everything canted, blurred, and trembling.  About half of the film is interview footage.  The movie purports to celebrate the courage of the rescuers -- they seem about as traumatized as the victims and have a characteristic "thousand yard stare."  The helicopter rescue, undertaken in defiance of government orders, seems to have been largely futile -- the people rescued all died.  Obviously, no one knew that the volcano wasn't about to erupt again and, so, the rescue showed desperate, if reckless, courage.  The mutilated burn victims are happy to be alive, but their lives are, more or less, ruined.  The Americans seem to think that there should be some tort liability for the catastrophe but arguments to this effect are very muted.  There's really no one and nothing to blame but human curiosity (people wanting to see a volcano up close and personal) and Mother Nature.  The island is now closed to visitors.

This sort of thing is necessarily gripping but not enlightening.  There's a good rendition of "How Great Thou Art" in Maori over the closing titles and, if you watch this thing, stick around for the credits and the song.  Rory Kennedy is the eleventh, and youngest, daughter of Robert Kennedy and the film is competently, if unimaginatively, directed.  When Jamal Kashoggi was tortured and dismembered by Saudi assassins, there was intercepted audio documenting the victim's suffering.  Donald Trump refused to listen to this audio, remarking that he didn't know Arabic, wouldn't have understood the words on the tape, and didn't want to listen to "suffering" in any event.  This was one of the few utterances by the former president with which I agreed.  Why do you want to immerse yourself  in horrible suffering?