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).
