Published 2018 on Down Under Flix
Director: Dean Semler
Director: Dean Semler
Stars: Howie Long, Suzy Amis, Scott Glenn, William Forsythe
Some
of the best-looking films produced in Australia have had Dean Semler working
behind the camera. Hoodwink (reviewed here), The Road
Warrior, Mad
Max: Beyond Thunderdome, Razorback, The Lighthorsemen, and Dead Calm all carry
Semler’s imprint as cinematographer. On taking his trade to Hollywood, Semler
scored an Academy Award for his stunning work on 1990’s Dances with Wolves, and since
then he’s chalked up a downright eclectic CV. Over the last three decades he’s
worked on popcorn flicks (XXX, 2012, Maleficent), broad comedies (The Nutty Professor 2, Bruce Almighty, Get Smart), period films with a
smidgen of prestige (The Power of
One, We Were
Soldiers, The
Alamo, Apocalypto, In the Land of Blood and Honey),
pulpy thrillers (The Bone
Collector, D-Tox),
and no less than six Adam Sandler films.
On
two occasions Semler has served in the director’s chair. He made his
directorial debut with Firestorm,
released in March 1998. His directorial swansong, Steven Seagal vehicle The Patriot, was released just
three months later and went straight to video. Closing his brief directing run
on a Steven Seagal feature is a somewhat ignoble end, but DOPs turned directors
have an odd history. For every Nicolas Roeg or Jan de Bont, there’s a Janus
Kaminski (Steven Spielberg’s DOP since Schindler’s
List) or Wally Pfister (Christopher Nolan’s go-to DOP) who dropped
the ball with their directing ventures Lost
Souls and Transcendence respectively.
Suffice to say, the skill set required to shoot a movie is not quite the same
as what’s required to direct. Having said that, as someone who had worked on
both massive (Dances with Wolves)
and massively troubled (Super
Mario Bros, Last
Action Hero, Waterworld)
productions, not to mention survived working with John Milius (Farewell to the King) and the
Brat Pack thrice (Young Guns, Young Guns II, The Three Musketeers), in 1998
Semler was a pretty safe bet to weather the storm, or indeed the firestorm, of
a film production.
Firestorm rides the wave of
mid-to-late 90s disaster films comprising Twister, Volcano, Dante’s Peak and their
ilk, but mixes in some crime/thriller elements ala Backdraft and Hard Rain (the latter
film’s writer, Graham Yost,
also worked on Firestorm’s
script). The film centres on smoke jumpers: elite firefighters who parachute
into severe blazes to help endangered citizens. When a major forest fire
provides a smokescreen for a prison break, hotshot Jesse (Howie Long) must take
down fugitive mastermind Shaye (William Forsythe) while proving his mettle to
follow in the footsteps of retiring boss Wynt (Scott Glenn).
Subbing
for Semler behind the camera is Stephen F. Windon, another Australian, and
looking at his CV it’s clear he’s followed some of Semler’s career cues. Windon
worked on shows like Police
Rescue and Come
in Spinner and low budget Australian films early in his career; like
Semler he got a career boost shooting for Kevin Costner, first on the Costner
production Rapa Nui and
then on the actor-filmmaker’s sophomore directorial feature The Postman; and after serving
as Semler’s DOP Windon went on to shoot five of the massively successful Fast and Furious films. As
befitting a film directed by a cinematographer, Firestorm looks good:
there’s some novel camerawork and angles, and several effective
weapons/debris-flying-at-camera moments that would have worked well
theatrically, and make me wonder if the film was ever conceived for 3D
screening. At times Windon’s compositions are too tight and we don’t always get
a sense of the expanse or geography of the fire, but that may be symptomatic of
budgetary constraints. As it stands, Firestorm is
one of the better post-Backdraft films
to capture the raging inferno. But where Backdraft was the #14 film of its year at the
box office and comfortably doubled its budget, Firestorm rolled in at #136 in its year of release
and earned only half its budget.
There’s
an unpretentious blue collar quality to Semler’s work here and his project
choices generally, many of which are, not to put too fine a point on it,
schlocky. Firestorm is
undeniably schlock, albeit schlock helmed by an Oscar-winning DOP and cast with
actors from Oscar=winning films of the 1990s, including The Silence of the Lambs (Glenn), Titanic (Suzy Amis), Saving Private Ryan (Barry
Pepper), Broken Arrow (Long),
and Virtuosity (Forsythe).
Okay, those last two didn’t win any Oscars. Regardless, the ensemble cast is a
curious liquorice all-sorts mix (with ex-footballer Long in a role previously
earmarked for Sylvester Stallone) who do serviceable work with generic
characterisations. I don’t necessarily use the term ‘schlock’ to damn Firestorm: there’s good schlock
and there’s bad schlock, and the passage of time has been kinder than expected
to Firestorm.
Had I seen Firestorm in
1998 I would probably have been unimpressed, but from today’s vantage point the
film clicks as a throwback to pre-Marvel, pre-Michael Bay action cinema, where
the action was tethered to Earth and earthlings and stories of working-class
heroism were not the exclusive domain of Peter Berg and Mark Wahlberg.
Ben Kooyman