San Andreas—Movie Review

by Peter J. O'Connell

San Andreas. Released: May 29, 2015 (USA). Runtime: 114 mins. Rated: PG-13 for intense disaster action and mayhem throughout and brief strong language.

In his seminal work of literary theory, The Poetics, Aristotle designated plot, “the arrangement of the incidents,” as the key component of drama, with characterization next--”characters appropriate to the plot”--with “spectacle, music” and other components that we today would call “production values” following as support to the plot and characters. Movies like San Andreas upend that process, however. Spectacle (usually today CGI—computer-generated imagery) rules the film, with plot and characterizations developed only minimally and serving primarily as means to display the production values.

In San Andreas, directed by Brad Peyton, the CGI is super-spectacular, a screen-filling, eye-popping orgy of destruction, as the dreaded San Andreas fault shifts, and a massive earthquake devastates much of California and Nevada. Hoover Dam gives way. Los Angeles becomes “Shaky Town”--even the “Hollywood” sign is destroyed! San Francisco suffers even more as skyscrapers topple into each other, and a cruise ship (not sure if its name is Poseidon) carried by a giant tsunami crashes into the Golden Gate Bridge. Etc., etc.  

The thin line of plot that carries us through all this imaginatively rendered devastation involves Ray, a Los Angeles helicopter rescue pilot (played by Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson), who flies from L.A. to San Francisco accompanied by his estranged wife, Emma (Carla Gugino), to save his late-teens daughter, Blake (Alexandra Daddario), and a pair of British brothers (Hugo Johnstone-Burt and Art Parkinson) who are with her. Ray is appropriately heroic, and Emma and Blake show that women can do brave things, too. Paul Giamatti plays the requisite scientist who “explains thing” to us.

Some audience members may, however, miss the usual teasing, suspenseful buildup of warning signs that precede the catastrophe in most disaster movies. San Andreas dispenses with that buildup and gets expeditiously to the big event itself. Some audience members also may muse about the moral issues involved when an L.A. pilot devotes the city's helicopter just to his own family, which is outside the L.A. area, despite the mass crisis in Los Angeles. And some may wonder why the teenage daughter of a white woman and a mixed-race man, both with brown eyes, has a quite white complexion, with dramatically blue eyes, and looks about 30. But don't let such concerns deter you from the considerable visual wonders offered by San Andreas. After all, you will get to have the “shudderingly pleasurable” experience of seeing California destroyed!

“Footnotes” to the film: San Francisco has been devastated, in whole or in part, by natural or human causes, in many movies, most notably San Francisco (1936)--starring Clark Gable, Spencer Tracy and Jeanette MacDonald—which was based on the actual earthquake of 1906. Los Angeles was subject to a similar fate in Earthquake (1974), starring the ever-heroic Charlton Heston and many others.