The 10 Best Disaster Movies for Everyone Who Loved ‘Twisters’

Confession: I finally watched 1996’s Twister for the first time. In my defense, I was 6 when it was released in theaters, and when I was old enough to appreciate ’90s action movies, I didn’t think I’d be that engaged by a film about a historic tornado season reigniting a romance between two storm chasers played by Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton.

Boy, was I wrong. It slaps.

First of all, we used to be a proper country, one in which a guy as un-brawny as Bill Paxton could be a romantic lead. But mostly, I was charmed by the premise, the craft of the film, and the surprisingly stacked cast, which features a journeyman Philip Seymour Hoffman, who was still capable of getting a little silly with it; Tár director and onetime sentient mold voice Todd Field; the always head-turning Patrick Fischler; and even my main girl Lois Smith as Helen Hunt’s aunt.

With the film’s sequel, the Glen Powell–starring Twisters, currently showing in theaters, it’s a great time to revisit some of the best disaster movies ever, both new and old. My goal, as always, is to provide a broad survey: iconic picks and a few surprises, plus a humble challenge to your assumptions about what a disaster movie is. My stipulations are that the movies need to have some sort of natural disaster or oppressive natural element, and that I’m not including any sort of nuclear event (feels too much like sliding into a different genre). And no pandemic outbreaks (sorry to 12 Monkeys and Contagion).

Let’s get swept away.

Pierce Brosnan stars as Harry Dalton, a United States Geological Survey volcanologist pulled back in for one last survey after the tragic volcano-related death of his fiancée four years earlier. When a long-dormant volcano kicks back into life in the town of Dante’s Peak, it’s a race against time to evacuate the residents of the town before the volcano fully erupts. Terminator’s Linda Hamilton co-stars as Rachel Wando, the town’s combination mayor and coffee shop owner.

This Michael Bay–directed action movie stars Bruce Willis and Ben Affleck as oil drillers–turned–astronauts tasked with planting a nuclear bomb on an asteroid that’s headed straight for Earth. It’s doubly notable these days for Affleck’s expletive-laden commentary and how he sagely suggests that it’d be easier to teach astronauts how to operate a drill. Still, Armageddon is probably one of the most famous disaster movies about Earth being destroyed by an asteroid, which is saying something: It’s a pretty crowded field.

Ruben Östlund’s black comedy deals with the catastrophic damage dealt to one couple’s domestic bliss when businessman Tomas (Johannes Bah Kuhnke) abandons his wife and children during a controlled avalanche in the French Alps, which Tomas mistakenly believes to be a real catastrophic event. His behavior manages to affect not just his own relationship, but also affects the relationships of several of his and his wife’s friends (including Game of Thrones’ Kristofer Hivju, Tormund Giantsbane himself) as Tomas and his wife Ebba (Lisa Loven Kongsli) bicker about what really happened.

Picking up the challenge issued by Ben Affleck in the commentary for Armageddon, The Core casts Aaron Eckhart as a geophysicist who leads a small team of scientists on a mission to the center of the planet in order to restart the rotation of its core before it stops entirely, leaving us unprotected against devastating solar radiation. Hillary Swank co-stars, with Stanley Tucci supporting and lending his fatherly gravitas to the role of Dr. Conrad Zimsky, the head researcher on the U.S.-developed tectonic weapon that stopped the core’s rotation in the first place.

University of Florida swimmer Haley (Skins’ Kaya Scodelario) squares off against both a Category 5 hurricane and numerous hungry alligators in this natural disaster–creature feature directed by Alexandre Aja. Intent on rescuing her estranged father Dave (Barry Pepper) from their family home, Haley, Dave, and their family dog Sugar become trapped in their attic crawlspace by rising tides and hungry gators, without any easy means of escaping.

Directed by Jeff Nichols, Take Shelter stars his longtime collaborator Michael Shannon as Curtis LaForche, an Ohio construction worker plagued by visions of apocalyptic storms that he channels into a constant renovation of a storm shelter on his property. His obsession brings him into conflict with both his family and his community, but it’s not clear whether it’s a delusion or something more sinister at play.

Sporting a buzz cut and some extremely stylish wire-rim specs, Kristen Stewart is front and center as Norah Price, a mechanical engineer stationed on deep sea research and drilling rig Kepler 822 as it experiences catastrophic structural collapse. Fearing the worst, she and her crew mates (including Vincent Cassel, Jessica Henwick, and Mamoudou Athie) walk a mile across the ocean floor in order to find the next-nearest research station to resurface from, all while being hunted by a previously undiscovered species the Kepler’s drilling has awoken from the depths of the Mariana Trench.

The middle film in Lars von Trier’s evocatively titled Depression Trilogy, Melancholia stars Kirsten Dunst as Justine, a woman whose life falls apart just in time for astronomers to predict a rogue planet (the titular Melancholia) may collide with the Earth. The film, while slow, is visually stunning and boasts an impressive cast featuring two generations of Skarsgårds (Stellan and Alexander), Charlottes Gainsbourg and Rampling, and even John Hurt.

We had to get a silly one in here, and Dean Devlin’s Geostorm is about as silly as it gets. Gerard Butler (unsung king of the disaster flick) stars as satellite designer Jake Lawson, who’s stripped of the command of his weather control satellite Dutch Boy after using it without authorization to stop a typhoon. Several years later, a disgraced Lawson teams up with astronaut Ute Fassbinder (Alexandra Maria Lara) to stop Dutch Boy from being used as a weapon by the United States, which could ultimately trigger the aforementioned cataclysmic Geostorm.

Yep, we had to. James Cameron’s epic historical drama is an all-timer, absolutely earning its 195-minute runtime for its breathtaking climax alone. You know what happens: The Titanic sinks in real time as star-crossed lovers Rose (Kate Winslet) and Jack (Leonardo DiCaprio) attempt to reunite on the sinking cruise liner. Still, if you haven’t seen it in two decades, it’s worth revisiting. The spectacle and the cinematography are so impressive in this movie you can almost forgive Cameron for making Bill Paxton (playing an oceanographer trying to recover the film’s MacGuffin, a diamond the size of a child’s fist) basically outright say, “I never understood the beauty of the Titanic until I heard this story—thank you, James Cameron.” It’s a little on the nose, but when you’ve made three of the four highest-grossing movies of all time, I guess you’ve earned it.