Friday, January 1, 2016.
San Andreas
starring Dwayne Johnson, Carla Gugino, Alexandra Daddario, Ioan Gruffudd, Archie Panjabi and Paul Giamatti
screenplay by Carlton Cuse
directed by Brad Peyton
Rating: ♦◊◊◊◊
A super-mega earthquake hits California along the length of the San Andreas fault. Raymond Gaines (Dwayne Johnson) is a Los Angeles Fire Department air rescue guy. He flies around in a helicopter rescuing people. When the big quake hits he flies to San Francisco to rescue his college-aged daughter there. (Is he allowed to do that? Well, nobody stops him. He’s Dwayne Johnson, after all.) Along the way he rescues his estranged wife and together they rescue their progeny plus a couple of English brothers who are with her as they fight their way through the crumbling city. Gaines and his ex-wife reunite in the process, making for a nice happy ending. Much better than the 1970s urban drama-disaster movies I remember, like Earthquake (1974, directed by Mark Robson, starring and Charlton Heston and Eva Gardner), and Towering Inferno (1974, directed by John Guillermin, starring Steve McQueen and Paul Newman).
The director is playing on the fear of heights more than on the fear of earthquakes.
I was in Tokyo on Friday, March 11, 2011 when the Great East Japan Earthquake struck (9.0 on the Richter Scale, one of the largest recorded earthquakes), so I had a special interest in this movie. I like to see how earthquakes are dramatized in the movies. While it is true that there is nothing that human beings can build that Nature cannot destroy, San Andreas completely misrepresents the durability/resistance of modern office towers in earthquake zones. For Hollywood story-telling purposes things have to fall apart easily and dramatically, so that’s what happens here. People like to think that a skyscraper is the most dangerous place to be in a strong tremblor because people would be trapped so high off the ground like office workers in New York’s World Trade Centers during the 9/11 terrorist attacks there, and when the buildings fall they fall from such a height. The director is playing on the fear of heights more than on the fear of earthquakes. In reality, tall buildings are among the safest places to be when the earth moves. Being tall means they have a higher frequency and it naturally takes more energy to shake them. Unless they are designed and built by an evil incompetent, or an Indian, they will not collapse like a house of cards.
Paul Giamatti plays Prof. Lawrence Hayes, a California Institute of Technology (Caltech) seismologist who successfully achieves the seismologist dream of accurately predicting earthquakes. In San Andreas the Paul Giamatti story line and the Dwayne Johnson story line don’t intersect. I suppose they are related to each other, but Giamatti and Johnson share no scenes at all, and each character could easily have its own movie. That might have been a good idea because the way the movie stands I am just really annoyed by the irrelevance of one character to the other.
Recent natural disaster movies I have liked included Twister (1996, directed by Jan de Bont, starring Bill Paxton and Helen Hunt) and Dante’s Peak (1997, directed by Roger Donaldson, starring Pierce Brosnan and Linda Hamilton). I really liked Dante’s Peak. Volcano (1997, directed by Mick Jackson, starring Tommy Lee Jones) about the La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles erupting into an urban volcano was an exciting diversion, but really dumb. The global apocalyptic movie 2012 (2012, directed by Roland Emmerich, starring John Cusak) was exciting but I was put off by how it exploited popular misunderstanding about the Mayan “Doomsday” calendar to make a disaster flick. Exploiting people is more like it.