Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Volcano: Rescue from Whakaari’ on Netflix, A Documentary About Escaping Natural Disaster That’s Lacking Fire

If there’s one thing Leonardo DiCaprio loves more than a girl under 25, it’s anything involving nature. So it should come as no surprise that he slapped his name on Netflix’s new documentary The Volcano: Rescue from Whakaari, the harrowing tale of a Kiwi volcanic eruption in 2019 that took 22 lives and impacted countless others. As one survivor describes the incident, it’s a look at a natural phenomenon that shows Mother Nature at her most beautiful yet most deadly.

THE VOLCANO: RESCUE FROM WHAKAARI: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Documentarian Rory Kennedy introduces viewers to the wide cast of characters who found themselves on New Zealand’s volcanic isle Whakaari (roughly translated as “White Island”) on December 9, 2019. Everyone from a honeymooning couple to a family to a wide spectrum of the tourist economy ended up tied up in a natural disaster like no other one fateful day. Unlike a Hawaiian volcano with its visually appealing lava flows, Whakaari trades in smoke, ash, and rock as its outward manifestations of geological activity below the surface. This particular bellow of fury released an absolutely gigantic plume into the air with gas that led most to suffer critical or life-ending burns. The film pieces together a coterie of survivors to tell the story as it unfolded for them.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: This documentary is pitched somewhere between the dramatic tactical operation of the Thai cave rescue documented in The Rescue and the all-out ecological fury of the fictionalized Everest. (Netflix’s algorithm must really know something about this content pillar doing well given that they just released a short docuseries Aftershock: Everest and the Nepal Earthquake in a similar vein.)

Performance Worth Watching: We’re all performing all the time, as sociologists will tell you, although no one is doing it consciously or with the intention of fiction here. The most fascinating person to listen to in The Volcano, though, is helicopter pilot Brian Depauw. He has just enough familiarity with the island, having made many flights there, yet he’s also experiencing it somewhat fresh as the day of eruption just happened to be his first one doing a solo flight with visitors.

Memorable Dialogue: This statistic has not been fact-checked by yours truly, but I will begin treating this factoid from survivor Jesse Langford as gospel: “You’ve got your highest likelihood of surviving any kind of trauma if you receive medical assistance within the first hour.”

Sex and Skin: The only skin you’re seeing here is heavily burned flesh. It’s survival, not sexuality that’s the natural impulse driving the people in the film.

Our Take: There’s just not enough footage to justify a feature-length documentary about this incident and understandably so! Everyone on the island who survived the eruption was more focused on their life than getting content. But a story that conjures such dramatic imagery yet requires heavy imaginative lifting through a mixture of still footage and talking head interviews is just not sufficient to sustain attention for a full hour and a half. Director Rory Kennedy finds scant appeal beyond creating a living history document. The attempts to add a political dimension to the tragedy by pointing out how no one has accepted responsibility feels shoehorned in and forced.

Our Call: SKIP IT. Wait for Roland Emmerich and his ilk to make this event into a Hollywood visual spectacle, or perhaps an audio podcast series to go in the opposite direction. The Volcano resides somewhere in a mushy middle between content forms, and Kennedy just picks one that doesn’t really suit the materials at her disposal.

Marshall Shaffer is a New York-based freelance film journalist. In addition to Decider, his work has also appeared on Slashfilm, Slant, Little White Lies and many other outlets. Some day soon, everyone will realize how right he is about Spring Breakers.