The Lost Bus

Tropic Sprockets by Ian Brockway

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There have been many disaster movies in cinema, like “Earthquake” and “The Towering Inferno” (both 1974) and “The Day After Tomorrow”(2004). Most stories have been sensationalistic. Now in a nonfiction manner but no less surrealistic is “The Lost Bus” by Paul Greengrass (“United 93”). 

The film chronicles the devastating wildfires in Paradise California in 2018. The blaze was caused by Pacific Gas and Electric, killing 85 people and destroying over 14,000 homes. The company pleaded guilty to manslaughter and an award of billions of dollars.

Greengrass is a poet of non-fiction anxiety and he pulls no punches here. This is a real life horror film and it is produced by Jason Blum who can be thought of as this century’s William Castle given that Blum specializes in horror. The film is co-produced by Jamie Lee Curtis.

Matthew McConaughey stars as school bus driver Kevin McKay, a struggling father living from paycheck to paycheck who is estranged from his taciturn and difficult teenaged son. Kevin is sweating and down and out. He has one task, to get the school children to their parents safely. But he has one big problem. The very earth itself has turned into a fire breathing dragon. Paradise California itself is a terrestrial terrorist and humans at least in part, are to blame.

The wildfire itself is something of menace, a fiery Leviathan born from the air, unrelenting, ravenous toxic and unstoppable. This is terror unleashed. Not since Dante’s Inferno has there been something so sad frightening or terrible. There is something of amorality here, but more to the point here is the concept of Koyaanisqatsi (the Native American Hopi word for life out of balance) which is also the title of an excellent film by Godfrey Reggio from 1982.

Great fireballs fall from the sky. Men, women and children are confronted and oppressed by solid walls of flame. Kevin races against time to somehow find a way out of a naturally unnatural Hell. The suffering depicted is almost too much. There are many repetitive scenes of cars and trucks racing from the walls a flame and stifling lung-killing black smoke. The screaming is infinite. While this is a test for the audience, Greengrass’s attention to detail is painstaking and obsessive.

The horror of this film is not that wildfires exist but that we fail to stop them despite almost superior technology. Mother Nature and the dispassionate wrath of fire itself shows its mean red upper hand.

America Ferrera co-stars as a teacher who boards Kevin’s school bus by unfortunate circumstances not by choice.

While the fire and frenzy is apocalyptic, Matthew McConaughey’s character by contrast is soft and almost invisible. Although he confronts the fire, he possesses none of his usual recognizable celebrity glare. This is one of his most understated performances.

The most potent part of the film lies in its last segment. McConaughey’s Kevin is a smoldering Jesus figure sacrificial and existential. Journeying through a fiery purgatory he leaves as he entered soft and silent without fanfare, Like Alan Ladd in “Shane” (1953). Matthew McConaughey is a savior-figure only to swiftly exit with modesty and apocalyptic anonymity. The message is a confirmed secular and humanistic one: the only sign of divinity Kevin seeks is the human touch of his son (played by McConaughey‘s real life son).

Fans of Greengrass will be well pleased. The conflicts (by conflagration or otherwise) never dissipate.

Write Ian at ianfree11@yahoo.com