Vajont - La diga del disonore (2001)

Director Renzo Martinelli mixes the usual disaster movie ingredients in Vajont with one ingredient you don't usually see. In Vajont, the movie shows the top engineers at the construction company who are responsible for building the then tallest dam in the world as practical people whose main concern is to finish the dam and get the Italian government to pay for the construction costs. The newlywed couple (the husband an engineer at the dam construction company), the reporter out to expose the flawed dam and the eventual disaster are the type of characters and situation you can find in plenty of movies about things going wrong. But when the top engineers realize they have a bad problem with landslides, they try to figure out what to do to protect the company's investment while avoiding a disaster. Since the incident at Vajont is well known in Italy, the ending of the movie is a foregone conclusion. Martinelli does a fine job of showing the dam builders trying to find a way out of the trap they are in, with the dam creating a lake against the Toc, the name the townspeople give to the crumbly mountain that borders the lake. The Italian DVD that had this movie also included an extra showing before and after, the step by step creation of the visual effects. A real interesting extra