Film Review: San Andreas
CATASTROCKPHE
Roland Emmerich’s two great skills as a maker of big-budget disaster epics: his fondness for showing the global, rather than simply local, effects of crisis and horror, and his ability to convey genuine (be it hammily-acted) emotional intensity through his central characters. His best films- Independence Day and 2013’s criminally underrated White House Down- avail of the Man And His Family Amidst The Nightmare formula brilliantly, but what director Brad Peyton achieves through ripping off the Emmerich formula in San Andreas doesn’t succeed in the same manner at all. Dwayne Johnson stars as a Californian helicopter pilot. We learn this because the film’s low-stakes opening sequence sees him rescue a beautiful young woman from a car accident caused by the opening of a fault line. The woman is listening to a recent Taylor Swift hit as she drives. This establishes the general tone of the film: hip, new, current and absurdly fast-paced.
At a shockingly short 114 minutes, San Andreas has time neither to explore any global impact of the California earthquake (and tremors) it depicts, nor delve in any real depth into the lives of its central family. The last 10 minutes, in particular, are affected by what seems to be a last-minute cutting of a substantial portion of the film, and hence San Andreas ends up having one of the worst film endings in history (this isn’t helped by a Michael Bay-esque American flag shot).
Surrounding Johnson’s character (whom this writer didn’t learn the name of until checking IMDB afterwards) are ex-wife Carla Gugino, daughter Alexandra Daddario and two fairly unlikeable English teenage boys. Gugino and Daddario are cast in horrifically poor female roles which look particularly old-fashioned in contrast to Mad Max’s Imperator Furiosa, and both are shot at notably Bay-ish angles for maximum emphasis of “their best physical assets”. The whole film plays very outdated, with the Carlton Cuse-scripted dialogue at times comically unrealistic and Paul Giamatti’s entire (be it reasonably enjoyable) performance consisting of the Oscar nominee spinning around to face the camera and shouting such classic zingers as “God help us all!”. This is a film which could, with very few creative changes, be written and directed by a young child with an an addiction to energy drinks, and one imagines that is Brad Peyton’s personality in a nutshell.
While the sight of Los Angeles skyscrapers crashing into one another is as enjoyable as always (especially without annoying Marvel superheroes getting in the way), the lack of any scope in the portrayal of the film’s “major incident” is irritating and, hence, the film is very underwhelming. The running times of Hollywood blockbusters are almost always grossly long. San Andreas could’ve done with an additional half hour. “Go big or go extinct”, as they say.
