'San Andreas'

In cinemas now!

I feel like disaster movies have a bad reputation, that is to say they tend to be all style and no substance, with the kind of writing that wouldn’t get you through the first year of film school. Let’s put it this way, it’s difficult to imagine a disaster movie being nominated for an Oscar, or indeed any award, other than the coveted most explosions per scene trophy. This might be in part due to them always feeling on the edge of bad taste. 'San Andreas' for example is about a series of earthquakes (and a resulting tsunami, which isn’t a spoiler, it’s in the trailer) and it’s not hard to see how some might not see the entertainment value in an earthquake at the moment. I mean it’s difficult to imagine a film being made about terrorists stealing a plane and flying into a building so why are natural disasters acceptable fun? You can pretend you’re watching high impact drama about characters finding their strength and overcoming nature but at the back of your mind you know you’re just here to watch everything and everyone get destroyed for your own amusement.

None the less some great disaster movies have been made, and poor taste or not they bridge a level of realism few other genres manage. This is a real threat being face by ostensibly real people and it’s difficult not to be shocked or panicked or simply afraid on their behalf. After all, what would you do if this happened to you? Would you be our plucky heroes or just one of the faceless mass just crushed by that building. If you’re like me and disaster movies are something you would normally avoid then I’m afraid to say 'San Andreas' is not the movie to coax you into the genre. Almost purposefully the film seems to embrace the “all style and no substance” method that is typical of the genre, and to it’s credit it does the style part flawlessly. Unfortunately I’m not of the opinion that that is enough, and dopey fun or not I’m positive more could have been made of this material.

The plot, for what little it is worth, concerns Ray (Dwayne Johnson) a rescue chopper pilot and the worlds most capable man who luckily knows literally everything about surviving disasters, who happens to be piloting his chopper on a maintenance check when the San Andreas fault rips itself apart hitting the west coast of America with the biggest earthquake in recorded history. Ray, who instead of returning to base, picking up his team, and joining the rescue effort, opts instead to basically steal his helicopter and go rescue his wife, Emma (Carla Gugino), and daughter, Blake (Alexandra Daddario), who have both been caught in the middle of the disaster and are both in desperate need of seeing just how amazing he is.

You see Ray and Emma are going through a divorce because of a tragic back story and she’s dating a rich guy who on the surface is better than Ray in every way but is bound to turn out to be a jerk when it comes time for men to be men and for women to be rescued. Thus Ray and Emma are forced to come together to save Blake, bringing the family back together under his enormous muscles and you’re probably already half asleep before this sentence even finishes. Yes it’s cliché, it’s unimaginative, it’s cheesy and let’s be frank it’s kind of stupid, but you know what, the mass destruction action set pieces are some of the best if not the best I think I’ve ever seen and there’s something to be said for knowing what you want to achieve and knuckling down; even if what you want to achieve is the kind of thing most of us would be too embarrassed to admit to.

In no way would I call 'San Andreas' a good movie but it’s not really trying to be, it never attempts to lift even a pinky above the cliché, but I’ll be damned if it isn’t entertaining (you know in that bad taste kind of way I mentioned before). It’s way over the top, the dialogue is cringe worthy and all the characters are as flat as pancakes, though they made the curious choice of not including an extensive supporting cast to be slowly killed off in imaginative ways, which is the one choice I actually approve of. Our heroes might be boring stock characters but at least we get to know them and can cheer them on. Also as much as I like The Rock he just isn’t suited to serious acting, for one thing he looks ridiculous. He’s so muscular it’s like he just fell out of a cartoon and I’m sorry but I find it impossible to imagine him as a real person, which is weird because he is a real person, sort of.

But despite my criticism it’s hard to deny that I don’t know the last time I saw movie mass destruction this compelling, exciting or just plain gorgeous looking. The film is all the poorer every time we have to cut away from the thrill and watch the actors stumble through the predictably awful script. On a side note the film also features Paul Giamatti in what is possibly the most pointless role to ever appear in a movie. He literally plays the science guy who knows everything because at some point during production the writers realised they needed a science guy who knew everything because disaster movies always have a science guy who knows everything. He genuinely shows up to tell us there are going to be lots of earthquakes after the earthquakes have already started in a movie about there being lots of earthquakes. He never interacts with Ray’s storyline, which is by far the main focus of the film, and whilst his story arch does involve hacking into the news network (which is complicated and dramatic for some unclear reason) and broadcasting a warning message to the people of San Francisco (which helps for some unclear reason), we never really get to see the point of all this we’re just told it was a good thing to do at the end of the film despite all the death and destruction we have witnessed. Supposedly he helped with the evacuation but buildings were falling down, were people not already evacuating? And how many people were really sat watching TV at this point?

The faceless mass of people really is the faceless mass, we have next to zero interaction with anyone who isn’t a name character so the impact of the presumably thousands of people who are killed and the rescue/evacuation effort scrambled together are pretty much lost altogether. The film is beautiful to look at and the actions sequences are every bit as thrilling as anything else you’ve ever seen and whilst I acknowledge that the film is probably a pretty good example of what it’s trying to be I don’t think what it’s trying to be is something worth doing.

Review by Kristian Mitchell-Dolby.

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