San Andreas

Director: Brad Peyton
Screenplay: Carlton Cuse (story by Andre Fabrizio & Jeremy Passmore)
Stars: Dwayne Johnson (Ray), Carla Gugino (Emma), Alexandra Daddario (Blake), Ioan Gruffudd (Daniel Riddick), Archie Panjabi (Serena), Paul Giamatti (Lawrence), Hugo Johnstone-Burt (Ben), Art Parkinson (Ollie), Will Yun Lee (Dr. Kim Park), Kylie Minogue (Susan Riddick), Colton Haynes (Joby), Todd Williams (Marcus), Matt Gerald (Harrison)
MPAA Rating: PG-13
Year of Release: 2015
Country: U.S.
San Andreas
San AndreasOne doesn’t usually think of Roland Emmerich’s disaster epics as cinematic models to be emulated, but that is precisely what screenwriter Carlton Cuse (working from a story by Andre Fabrizio and Jeremy Passmore) seems to have done with the mega-earthquake thriller San Andreas, whose disaster spectacle and sense of moral reckoning is hung on exactly the same narrative backbone as Emmerich’s world-shattering 2012 (2009). In answering the question “What do we do now?,” the last line of dialogue in San Andreas—“We rebuild”—sends exactly the same message as 2012, insisting that whatever disasters may befall us, we will transcend them and persevere.

The horrors of the past are always muted by the promise of the future, which is what makes such disaster movies palatable to mass audiences. Disaster movies, especially those in the Emmerich mold, leave us feeling good about ourselves despite the millions who have died horrible (mostly off-screen) deaths. Granted, in 2012 Emmerich pretty much destroyed the entire world as we know it, whereas Cuse (Bates Motel) and director Brad Peyton (Journey 2: The Mysterious Island) are content to limit the majority of the havoc in San Andreas to the California coastline (although one ominous line of dialogue informs us that the earthquakes are so powerful they will be felt on the East Coast). The human drama, however, is virtually the same, in terms of both plot points and lack of effectiveness.

Both films feature a likeable protagonist who saves himself and others while reconciling with his ex-wife and children, who have been taken in by a wealthy, but shallow other man. Emmerich went the more directly everyman route by casting John Cusack as a failed science fiction writer making ends meet as a limo driver, while San Andreas gives us The Rock himself, Dwayne Johnson, as Ray, a heroic fire-and-rescue helicopter pilot with more than 600 confirmed rescues and multiple tours in Afghanistan. He’s about as ordinary as Rambo, but the way he’s written and the way Johnson plays him, we are clearly intended to see him as a normal, everyday, down-to-earth, relatable dude, which is why we feel for him that his wife, Emma (Carla Gugino), has left him for Daniel Riddick, a superficial, wealthy corporate architect (Ioan Gruffudd) with whom she is about to move in along with their college-age daughter, Blake (Alexandra Daddario). Ray’s biceps are clearly no match for Riddick’s modernist L.A. mansion and sharply tailored suits. But, when the earth starts shaking and buildings start falling down, the real man emerges and the fake one disappears, which makes it all too clear that San Andreas’s subtext is really on its surface. Like many a disaster movie before it, but especially 2012, the catastrophic earthquakes that tear apart the California coast from L.A. to San Francisco are simply background for the reuniting of that great symbol of American moral fortitude: the nuclear family.

There are other similarities, as well, including a prominent scientist character who sees what is coming. In this case, the scientist, a Cal Tech professor of earthquake studies, is played by Paul Giamatti, an actor who is so good that he is able to take a character who exists almost entirely to dispense important plot points and scientific information about earthquakes and fault lines, and make him feel real. Giamatti’s character has recently developed some kind of device that uses magnetism to detect oncoming earthquakes, and his first success with the device comes when all hell starts breaking loose. Otherwise, he has literally nothing to do in the movie but dispense information (he does get to emote briefly when a close friend is killed), and it is testament to Giamatti’s talent that he is able to make a character where there is none.

Of course, San Andreas is really about destruction, and the orgy of cracking earth, collapsing dams, tumbling buildings, and rushing tsunamis is all expertly rendered, missing only the theater-shaking gimmick of Sensurround, which shook audiences watching Irwin Allen’s infamous Earthquake (1974). Some of the spectacle is genuinely spectacular (an early sequence depicting the Hoover Dam collapsing has real power and weight, as does an opening rescue sequence that has nothing to do with the plot proper), although by the end the movie relies on an almost entirely and increasingly unconvincing digital environment to depict San Francisco flooded. To their credit, the filmmakers generally stay somewhere in the neighborhood of physical reality, although a sequence in which Ray and his family drive a speedboat through a collapsing building is all too reminiscent of the utterly absurd sequence in which John Cusack does the same thing in a limousine in 2012.

Placing the broken family in the middle of all the destruction gives Ray, Emma, and Blake a reason to pull back together, and the film adds in a few additional characters, including Ben (Hugo Johnstone-Burt), an impossibly nice young man from England who Blake meets when he is about to interview for a job at Riddick’s company, and Ben’s precocious little brother Ollie (Art Parkinson). They essentially become part of the reconstituted family, which allows the film to bask in the glow of reunification as the emergency vehicles swarm to put the pieces of California back together and a giant American flag unfurls over the shattered remnants of the Golden Gate Bridge. It’s all about as subtle as an earthquake.

Copyright ©2015 James Kendrick

Thoughts? E-mail James Kendrick

All images copyright © Warner Bros.

Overall Rating: (2.5)




James Kendrick

James Kendrick offers, exclusively on Qnetwork, over 2,500 reviews on a wide range of films. All films have a star rating and you can search in a variety of ways for the type of movie you want. If you're just looking for a good movie, then feel free to browse our library of Movie Reviews.


© 1998 - 2024 Qnetwork.com - All logos and trademarks in this site are the property of their respective owner.