Movies have been obsessed with depicting the end of the world for a really long time. Whether it’s death and destruction by storm, volcano, asteroid, or, yes, earthquake, there have never been any shortage of films where some sort of natural calamity strikes a popular area, destroying all of the landmarks and killing all of the nice people who call them home. Audiences love it. Maybe there’s a unique thrill we get from seeing filmmakers depict awful fears that we don’t like to admit to ourselves could some day become real that explains it. Maybe seeing this sort of material visualized taps into a place so deep in our subconscious that we don’t know how to access it any other way, so there’s some part of us that needs to see it. Or maybe people are just really messed up.
Either way, writer/director Brad Peyton’s (Journey 2: The Mysterious Island, Cats & Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore) San Andreas is another one of these disaster movies, in the most generic way possible. It features all of the same character archetypes that these disaster movies always do, it builds to all of the same moments of peril that these disaster movies always do, and it ends in the same Hollywood way that all of these disaster movies always do. Basically, this is exactly the sort of cookie-cutter, studio movie that feels like it could have been directed by the same guy hired to make things like Journey 2: The Mysterious Island and Cats & Dogs: Kitty Galore.
To get more into particulars instead of just calling the movie basic and moving on, the disaster this time is a gigantic earthquake that destroys everything along the San Andreas fault, the big hero guy is a rescue helicopter played by Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, the nerdy scientist guy who sees the disaster coming and needs to warn everyone is played by Paul Giamatti, and the women who need to be rescued are Carla Gugino and Alexandra Daddario, who play The Rock’s ex-wife and daughter, respectively. Basically, everything on the west coast starts getting destroyed and it becomes the Rock’s mission to save his former family and maybe win them back from Gugino’s fancy, rich new boyfriend (Ion Gruffudd) in the process, and then every once in a while we cut away to Giamatti, who looks at computer screens and yells about how exciting the things he’s seeing on them are a lot, and that’s the movie.
Which brings us to the main problem with the film—the script is not good, and feels like it was penned by a Random Hollywood Script Generator rather than a real person. The characters are thin, the dialogue is clunky, and the pacing makes a movie that isn’t really that long (114 min) feel too long nonetheless. The main problem is that all of the family drama between the Rock and his ex-wife, and the tension that comes from his daughter having a new father figure in her life, is really lame and poorly executed, and the bits with Giamatti’s character don’t actually end up having any real impact on how the rest of the story goes at all, so any time things aren’t being destroyed and people aren’t being crushed or swallowed by the Earth, the movie gets pretty boring.
A couple of rewrites could probably have fixed the family drama by finding a way to keep the characters from seeming tone deaf and self-indulgent for working through their personal problems while millions and millions of people die around them in horrible ways, but the Giamatti stuff needed to get excised completely. It has no impact on either the plot or the heart of the film, and it drags the narrative momentum to a complete halt every time we cut to it. Giamatti is a great actor, but the principal cast is good enough that they didn’t need him to come in and class up the presentation or anything.
That’s not to say that the performances are great though. Everybody does a fine job with the nuts and bolts blockbuster movie stuff that they’re asked to do, but that sort of stuff doesn’t ask very much of a performer. Why would you take a couple of actors as charming and sassy and fun as Gugino and Johnson and relegate them to being a nice, concerned mom and an overly-earnest dad? Daddario does her best, and is such a radiant physical presence that any big, mainstream movie is going to benefit from having her in it, but she’s just way too old to register as being a teenager leaving the house for college for the first time, as her character is written. When you watch a grown man assure a grown woman that he’s not going to try to replace her dad, even though he’s balling her mom now, things get a little bit squirmy—and that’s probably the best stuff this movie has to offer as far as Gruffudd’s stepfather character is concerned. San Andreas was just fine milking a man vs. nature plot, and the lengths it goes to in order to turn him into a human villain are so ham-fisted, obvious, and just plain lame that the turn he takes ends up being a huge mistake. It’s in moments like these that San Andreas especially plays like a parody of Hollywood filmmaking rather than a shining example of it.
All of this acting and writing and character stuff generally takes a backseat to the big action sequences in a movie like this though. Disaster movies are destruction porn first and foremost, and San Andreas could have still been a lot of fun if its earthquake-related devastation was thrilling to watch. It really isn’t though. It’s not terrible—the effects work is generally serviceable enough, and whatnot—but it could have done a lot more to really milk its survival situations of some ever-increasing tension. As is, the deadly and dangerous scenarios come at you constantly, and after a while all of the peril has a numbing effect rather than an agitating one. Modern filmmakers could stand to learn a lot about the beauty of escalating stakes that lead to a single, satisfying blowoff, and they wouldn’t have to look far to learn the lesson.
The first scene of this very film builds tension and stakes around a teenage driver who’s constantly being distracted by her phone and anything else shiny in her car that might take her eyes off the road. The threat is established, a tone of dread takes over, and then you’re teased for a while with a series of potential calamities before that one last distraction finally causes bad things to happen. This one scene can teach you everything you need to know about making an action-packed movie satisfying, and then the rest of the movie tosses the lesson aside in order to pack in more and more empty spectacle that ultimately culminates in San Francisco getting destroyed on film for what’s probably the 8th or 9th time in the last decade. Audiences are too immune to these sort of visuals of destruction for them to mean anything on their own anymore. They’ve seen too much of it. If you want to get a rise out of them, it’s time to put the CG wizardry aside and go back to simple filmmaking tricks.
By the time this film is over, San Francisco has been decimated by quakes and tsunamis to the point where it exists as nothing more than urban soup, and you don’t really feel the impact of any of it. San Andreas doesn’t do too many things terribly wrong, but it also doesn’t manage to do anything terribly right.