"It isn't our fight,""They had it coming for all the things they've done to the rest of the world," and "Now they know what a real disaster feels like," are commonly expressed sentiments.
After the literal wreckage of 2005, which began with the aftershock of an undersea quake, and whose litany of the homeless stretched from New Orleans to Kashmir, cinematic fantasies of disaster feel more flippant than ever.
Mr. Hodges, working from an exceptionally cunning script by Paul Mayersberg, traces his hero's downward spiral with patient, chilly precision, and the course of the disaster feels so inexorable that you're shocked when the worst doesn't happen -- or, rather, when it happens in a way that leaves the apparently ill-fated Jack untouched.
But in his case these disasters feel arbitrary; they are typically a result of corporate restructurings, not of physics.
Yet after a fluffily enjoyable first half, the attempt to dramatise and process Japan's recent run of natural disasters feels perilously jejune: as the spectacle expands, the film becomes less engaging and affecting.
The devastation in Syria and the migrant crisis it precipitated, El Niño in the Pacific, earthquakes in Chile, hurricanes in the US, typhoons, Isis – the list of both natural and manmade disasters feels like it's getting longer with every day.
However, the presence of wild animals in these disasters feels more avoidable.
The dreams he has of his daughter after the disaster feel like genuine insights, providing the emotional substance of an obsessive mindset.
"Nowhere was the tragedy of the Titanic disaster more felt than in Southampton," says the website.
