Showing posts with label carla gugino. Show all posts
Showing posts with label carla gugino. Show all posts

Friday, June 12, 2015

San Andreas


DIRECTOR: Brad Peyton  LEAD CAST:  Dwayne Johnson, Carla Gugino, Paul Giamatti, Alexandra Daddario, Iona Gruffudd, Archie Panjabi, Colton Haynes  SCREENWRITER:  Carlton Cuse   PRODUCER:  Beau Flynn  EDITOR:  Bob Ducsay  MUSICAL DIRECTOR:  Andrew Lockington  GENRE:  Disaster film  CINEMATOGRAPHER: Steve Yedlin   DISTRIBUTOR:  Warner Bros. Pictures  LOCATION:  United States RUNNING TIME: 114 minutes
Technical assessment:  3.5
Moral Assessment:  3.5
CINEMA rating: V 14
            Ray Gaines (Dwayne Johnson), a Los Angeles Fire Department helicopter rescue-pilot is at the midst of his divorce when he takes a dangerous rescue mission and succeeds in saving an earthquake victim trapped in a ravine. Upon knowing that his estranged wife Emma (Carla Gugino) is trapped in a tall building in downtown L.A. and that his daughter Blake (Alexandra Daddario) is pinned down in an underground garage in San Francisco, he races across California to rescue them. Meanwhile Caltech seismologist Lawrence Hayes (Paul Giamatti) predicts the 1,300 km San Andreas fault line is about to set off. He organizes his team and media staff to get on air and he warns everyone about the coming massive earthquake. His live broadcast with journalist Serena (Archie Panjabi) helps get some people out of harm's way. As San Andreas fault shifts and rips apart major cities along the fault line from Los Angeles to San Francisco, buildings collapse and the tsunami sweeps away whatever is left, an epic devastation.
            San Andreas owes much of its box-office success to its amazing effects, its vivid depiction of mass destruction, which could be the best to-date.   Because it involves real people in a realistic disastrous situation (and not real people scurrying away from robots or zombies), the movie is able to engage the audience in the emotional ebb and flow naturally rendering human beings helpless in such a calamity.  Director Brad Peyton stages this cinematic destruction of US West Coast in meticulously rendered CGI, so real that it is almost palpable—particularly among audiences in the Philippines when warnings of “the big one”, the imminent splitting open of the West Valley fault. are currently being issued.”  The rupturing of a dam, the fires resulting from power lines going haywire, all those scenes are not likely to boost tourism in California, but it should give the viewers their first scary lecture on earthquake survival.
            Despite the empty nest syndrome—in the middle of a divorce, with his wife now living with a new boyfriend, while his daughter is off to college—Ray has no time to brood as his job throws him into what may be the most challenging rescue mission of his career.  At the end of the day, all those sights of the earth heaving and then breaking up and swallowing people alive really isn’t just about the prediction-come-true of a scientist nobody listens to; it’s more about how catastrophes reduce our personal problems into silliness, how—when all around us the world is literally crumbing we get to realize what matters most in life.  Spoiler coming: Ray is reunited with wife and together they save their daughter, a victory for the family.  Guess who the bad guy is.  (CINEMA tip: please keep young children out of the theater.  We sat next to a couple with a toddler who kept screaming at the scary sights.  The father took him out for a long while and when they returned the kid was asleep—from exhaustion, most likely).