San Andreas (2015)
Directed by Brad Peyton
In the aftermath of a massive earthquake in California, a rescue-chopper pilot makes a dangerous journey across the state in order to rescue his estranged daughter.
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24 films that influenced San Andreas
What critics say influenced San Andreas
Nothing is subtle, and Ioan Gruffudd's cowardly tycoon is a copy of Richard Chamberlain's engineer from The Towering Inferno, but Johnson, a human edifice, is more than equal to the preposterous destruction.
Oblivious to both narrative logic and the laws of physics, the cliché-filled “San Andreas” doesn’t nearly have the star power of earlier, better disaster movies it borrows from like “The Poseidon Adventure,” “Earthquake” and “The Towering Inferno” — which featured Paul Newman as the tower’s architect, a role played here by an embarrassed-looking Ioan Gruffudd (as Gugino’s fiancé).
Meanwhile, Mrs The Rock is romancing a slick architect who – like Paul Newman in The Towering Inferno – has just designed the tallest building in San Francisco.
The film in fact would be a paltry thing indeed without its commendably imperturbable star, especially given a shifting landscape that no longer finds the modern-day equivalents of Ava Gardner, Shelley Winters, or Fred Astaire (who was Oscar-nominated for The Towering Inferno, of all things) willing to climb onboard such spectacles as they were once wont to do.
At least Earthquake -- a clear inspiration for this film, even if its release date of 1974 makes it seem as long ago as the Dead Sea Scrolls -- jumped between characters and showed a real L.A. populated by cowards and heroes, daredevils and madmen, Charlton Heston and Richard Roundtree.
It’s essentially a remake/ripoff of the 1974 disaster movie nadir “Earthquake,” only there’s only a handful of characters, not the usual three or four dozen.
Earthquakes haven't been exploited at the movies as much as one would think (most prominently in 1974's Earthquake, which brought us the Sensurround gimmick), but those with long-memories can cross-reference 1997's Dante's Peak and Volcano, which are more or less the same movie as (each other and) San Andreas, except with geysers of lava.
And as we all know, sound technology has come a long way since the 1974 Charlton Heston “Earthquake” movie introduced audiences to something called SenSurround.
Of course, San Andreas is really about destruction, and the orgy of cracking earth, collapsing dams, tumbling buildings, and rushing tsunamis is all expertly rendered, missing only the theater-shaking gimmick of Sensurround, which shook audiences watching Irwin Allen’s infamous Earthquake (1974).
Even 1974’s Earthquake at least had sensurround and seats that shook.
Needless to say, this is a disaster film akin to Roland Emmerich's The Day After Tomorrow or 2012.
Though directed by Brad Peyton, parts of San Andreas have the distinctively tin-eared vibe of Roland Emmerich’s The Day After Tomorrow, in which Jake Gyllenhaal nearly drowns in icy waters trying to swim to a pay phone to call his father and say he’s okay.
The level of destruction rivals that of a Roland Emmerich film ( 2012 , The Day After Tomorrow , Independence Day ).
Following Roland Emmerich’s near-back-to-back attempts at over-the-top natural disaster movies 2012 and The Day After Tomorrow, director Brad Peyton’s San Andreas is a surprisingly straightforward and fun, but still inane, ride that stretches the boundaries of scientific accuracy in the interest of supplying non-stop ground-shaking mayhem.
In San Andreas , director Brad Peyton shows us what all those Roland Emmerich movies (from The Day After Tomorrow to 2012 ) were missing: a jacked superhero to growl one-liners at all the CGI falling stuff.
Or at the very least, The Day After Tomorrow in 2004.
But “San Andreas” is never scary, not in its torrents of lowest-bidder computer-generated imagery, not amidst story elements that evoke the ill-fated 1997 Tommy Lee Jones vehicle “Volcano,” and especially not when Caltech seismologist Lawrence Hayes (Paul Giamatti) tells us how scary they are, mostly with junk science and an early, unearned emotional catharsis.
Earthquakes haven't been exploited at the movies as much as one would think (most prominently in 1974's Earthquake, which brought us the Sensurround gimmick), but those with long-memories can cross-reference 1997's Dante's Peak and Volcano, which are more or less the same movie as (each other and) San Andreas, except with geysers of lava.
Every generation gets its disaster epic where parts of California rumble under shifting tectonic plates and the Hollywood sign reads " O LYW OD," whether it's "Earthquake" (1974) or "Volcano" (1997) or the new entry, "San Andreas."
Not since, good Lord, maybe Volcano back in 1997 have I seen a disaster movie so painstakingly eager to be the most prototypical disaster movie it could possibly be.
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Needless to say, this is a disaster film akin to Roland Emmerich's The Day After Tomorrow or 2012.
The level of destruction rivals that of a Roland Emmerich film ( 2012 , The Day After Tomorrow , Independence Day ).
Just like John Cusack in 2012, Ray's estranged from his wife — played by Carla Gugino — which means the rupture of California's notorious San Andreas fault can serve a handy-dandy marriage-counseling function.
Following Roland Emmerich’s near-back-to-back attempts at over-the-top natural disaster movies 2012 and The Day After Tomorrow, director Brad Peyton’s San Andreas is a surprisingly straightforward and fun, but still inane, ride that stretches the boundaries of scientific accuracy in the interest of supplying non-stop ground-shaking mayhem.
One doesn’t usually think of Roland Emmerich’s disaster epics as cinematic models to be emulated, but that is precisely what screenwriter Carlton Cuse (working from a story by Andre Fabrizio and Jeremy Passmore) seems to have done with the mega-earthquake thriller San Andreas, whose disaster spectacle and sense of moral reckoning is hung on exactly the same narrative backbone as Emmerich’s world-shattering 2012 (2009).
And Roland Emmerich's unfairly maligned 2012 understood that its story was a tragedy.
In fact, "San Andreas" wants to be "The Poseidon Adventure," but it doesn't have Gene Hackman as a tough-talking minister and Shelley Winters as a champion swimmer gone to seed.
The most fertile wave of celluloid disaster porn came in the 1970s, when maestros of mayhem like producer Irwin Allen churned out star-studded cataclysms like The Poseidon Adventure and The Towering Inferno .
The level of destruction rivals that of a Roland Emmerich film ( 2012 , The Day After Tomorrow , Independence Day ).
The good ones give you enough to look at that you can make that deal for a couple hours at a time; Independence Day, for instance, has the right balance of cheese and pathos that keeps it entertaining rather than unsettling.
If you don’t think you’ve seen it, you have, because just in recent years it’s been in Twister, 2012, The Day After Tomorrow, Deep Impact, Volcano, War of the Worlds, Independence Day and, now, San Andreas.
Earthquakes haven't been exploited at the movies as much as one would think (most prominently in 1974's Earthquake, which brought us the Sensurround gimmick), but those with long-memories can cross-reference 1997's Dante's Peak and Volcano, which are more or less the same movie as (each other and) San Andreas, except with geysers of lava.
Following in the footsteps of Earthquake and Dante's Peak, this adrenaline-assisted blockbuster employs state-of-the-art digital artistry and 3D to plonk us amid the collapsing buildings of what boffin Paul Giamatti notes is "the largest magnitude quake in recorded history".
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And while Bogart's Rick Blaine in Casablanca opined that "it doesn't take much to see that the problems of three little people don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world," in the disaster genre, the problems of the little people are paramount.
It was Rick from Casablanca who famously said, "It doesn't take much to see that the problems of three little people don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world."
Just over 40 years ago, California got rocked to the ground in "Earthquake," part of a disaster-film epidemic in 1974 that included "The Towering Inferno" and "Airport 1975."