In the depths of 2020, my friends and I, much like everyone else, were looking for ways to stay connected while indefinitely sheltering away from the world. Every so often, we'd choose a film to watch together, set a start time, hit play and jump on the group chat to talk about it. It didn't matter what we watched, and we mostly gravitated towards violent escapism, particularly the high-octane American action cinema of the 1990s, with some deviation towards a few comparably low-key big-budget disaster movies — only Outbreak and Contagion were off limits. I've listed all the films below, in the order that we watched them, as a record of that bizarre period of our lives. I found something helpful in all of them. The experience of watching these films together was a distracting and necessarily joyful way to spend a lot of empty time. I'm glad we didn't need more than seventeen.
All of these films were watched between 22nd March and 12th August 2020, with Brad, Jacob, Gen, and Rowan.
01. FACE/OFF (John Woo, 1997)
02. TOTAL RECALL (Paul Verhoeven, 1990)
03. SPEED (Jan de Bont, 1994)
04. DEMOLITION MAN (Marco Brambilla, 1993)
05. TIMECOP (Peter Hyams, 1994)
06. UNSTOPPABLE (Tony Scott, 2010)
07. VOLCANO (Mick Jackson, 1997)
08. ARMAGEDDON (Michael Bay, 1998)
09. CON AIR (Simon West, 1997)
10. BREAKDOWN (Jonathan Mostow, 1997)
11. JURASSIC WORLD: FALLEN KINGDOM (J.A. Bayona, 2018)
12. PHONE BOOTH (Joel Schumacher, 2002)
13. RED EYE (Wes Craven, 2005)
14. MERCURY RISING (Harold Becker, 1998)
15. DANTE'S PEAK (Roger Donaldson, 1997)
16. ANACONDA (Luis Llosa, 1997)
17. DEEP IMPACT (Mimi Leder, 1998)