The Lost Bus begins in darkness. A shaky, first-person-POV camera shot weaves through the air above the hills of rural Northern California. The camera skips across the surface of dry grass, then zooms high above the forest, following the trajectory of a large power line. The electrical tower shakes and creaks in the wind. The shot lingers, just for a moment, on the mechanical components of the power line.
By now, we all know how the rest of this story goes. The 2018 Camp Fire, which was started by neglected PG&E equipment and fueled by extreme winds and dry vegetation, went on to become the deadliest wildfire in California history. But the 130-minute film, directed by master manipulator of tension Paul Greengrass (United 93, Captain Phillips, the Bourne franchise) and starring Matthew McConaughey and America Ferrera, is less concerned with history than with a few hours of the fire. Coproduced by Jamie Lee Curtis and released on Apple TV+ in September, The Lost Bus is based on a real-life vignette from Paradise: One Town’s Struggle to Survive an American Wildfire, a compilation of on-the-ground reporting by former San Francisco Chronicle reporter Lizzie Johnson. McConaughey plays down-on-his-luck school bus driver Kevin McKay, who, along with two teachers—though in the film there’s just one, Ferrera’s character, Mary Ludwig—heroically evacuated a busload of schoolchildren from Paradise during the fire. (Both McKay and Ludwig consulted on the film.)
Greengrass specializes in portraying unthinkable crises in confined spaces. The Lost Bus is the latest entry in this genre, which some call docudrama but might more accurately be called “true disaster.”
The film moves chronologically, beginning the day before the fire. Scenes alternate between Cal Fire’s incident command center, the school-bus-evacuation narrative, and glimpses inside the heart of the fire itself courtesy of dizzying POV shots, which I came to think of as “fire cam.” At one point, the fire cam emerges from the thick of the blaze to view Paradise on the horizon. It’s the unmistakable viewpoint of a predator stalking its innocent prey.
With the exception of a few clunky CGI moments, the movie is competently filmed and performances are as expected: McConaughey’s trademark charisma is dialed down for the role but still irresistible, while Ferrera’s patented combination of everywoman strength and vulnerability is on full display. Unfortunately, the script is at times almost comically wooden; the characters don’t have conversations so much as they have situation reports. It’s an understandable challenge: People in emergency situations mostly talk about the emergency at hand. But it can be difficult to engage critically with such dialogue, like the shouts of a fire technician: “You don’t understand! Extreme fire behavior! Critical rate of spread, heading west toward Paradise!” So it comes as a moment of intrigue when Cal Fire battalion chief Ray Martinez, played by Yul Vazquez, finally takes a stab at greater meaning. After reciting the day’s grim fire statistics to the press, he walks away from the mic but changes his mind. He turns back to the spotlight and looks almost directly into the camera, ready to deliver the moral message of the film: “Every year, the fires get bigger,” he announces. “And there’s more of them. We’re being damn fools. That’s the truth.”
Which prompts the question even a cub reporter would know to ask: Why? But the scene ends there.
I’ll field this one, Captain: The causes of the current wildfire crisis in California are, in no particular order: extreme weather conditions that are the result of human-caused climate change, increased human presence in the wildland-urban interface, and 150 years of militant suppression of naturally occurring wildfires in fire-adapted ecosystems. That last human action doesn’t merely make the land overcrowded with vegetation and hence more prone to harmful fire; it represents a fundamental denial of the complex webs of relationships among land, people, and fire—a willful and exploitative misunderstanding that originates in colonialist views of nature and Indigenous people.
None of that merits an on-screen mention in The Lost Bus. The more direct cause of the Camp Fire, neglected PG&E equipment, does make a couple of brief appearances, as do utility representatives who spark serious side-eye from the on-screen firefighters. Still, every hero needs a villain, and the enemy in the film appears to be wildfire itself. And relegating fire to the role of monster, rather than understanding it as a reaction to human-influenced circumstances, is exactly how we got here in the first place. The call is coming from inside the house.
Viewers probably aren’t watching The Lost Bus to understand the larger context of Paradise’s tragedy. We are here to watch McConaughey drive a big bus through a towering inferno. Or to feel the fear when Ferrera’s voice cracks as she ponders the grim possibility of burning alive while trapped in a bus full of children. But by the time the bus is threatened by masked bandits (“Kevin, there’s looters,” Ferrera helpfully yells), who pound on the door and brandish a gun, the Hollywood treatment begins to wear thin. (That looter bit, which did not occur during the Camp Fire, lands more like misinformation—during the evacuation, people actually opened their car doors to strangers, offering rides and shelter from the firestorm.)
I know I’m expecting too much from a movie that’s clearly designed to poke my amygdala until it hurts. Hollywood is fueled by artificially inflated antes, and Greengrass’s oeuvre is enjoyable to audiences precisely because it provides the type of catharsis that real-life disaster situations rarely do. I wouldn’t begrudge anyone that adrenaline rush, although the first time I watched the preview for The Lost Bus, my own wildfire PTSD was certainly triggered. The film is effectively a big-budget reenactment of the kind of evacuation videos we’ve all watched hundreds of times before. Still, many Camp Fire survivors reported enjoying it, and the production team helped fund a memorial to the fire in Paradise.
The day I sat down to stream the feature, a PG&E drone, mapping potential hazard trees near power lines, buzzed over my Northern California home. Down the road, I heard the clamor of a chain saw as neighbors gleaned firewood from dead trees felled during recent fire-mitigation projects, including a prescribed burn less than 100 yards from my house. I had a cup of chamomile tea on hand to calm my nerves, and I was ready to press “stop” at any time if I felt myself spiraling into panic. But I didn’t need to. Instead, I was left cold. Fire does a lot of things, but it shouldn’t do that.
The Lost Bus was filmed before the recent fires in Los Angeles. Now that the crisis has hit home for Hollywood, it’ll be interesting to see if filmmakers will keep churning out the same old disaster flicks, or if some will seek out stories that reflect more-genuine aspects of life during climate catastrophe. The true story of fire resides in the ways that communities care for themselves in the wake of disaster; in the courage required by fire practitioners and nature lovers to return good fire to the land; in the many histories of that land itself; and in grief, joy, and beauty, in addition to fear.
Early on in the film’s timeline, as the authorities realize what is about to happen, Vazquez’s beleaguered Cal Fire chief hollers a warning to his peers. “Here’s the choice,” he shouts over the din of first responders. “Bust the system, or play by the book and everyone dies.” It’s a note that I hope Hollywood will take.•
Manjula Martin is the author of The Last Fire Season: A Personal and Pyronatural History. She is the coauthor of Fruit Trees for Every Garden, which won the American Horticultural Society Book Award. Martin edited the anthology Scratch: Writers, Money, and the Art of Making a Living, and she was the managing editor of the National Magazine Award–winning literary journal Zoetrope: All-Story. Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, the Los Angeles Times, and the Virginia Quarterly Review. She lives in California.
