‘San Andreas’ Review: Spectacle over drama

While a continent is being broken apart by history’s greatest earthquake, a broken family does everything to get back together. That is basically Brad Peyton’s San Andreas, a movie that masks a family drama about a husband trying to save his marriage with computer-generated spectacles of entire cities being destroyed by Mother Nature. (READ: Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson: I love the PH, I’ll never forget it)

It all sounds poetic. However, the movie is not meant to inspire deep notions on relationships. It is as blunt as a baseball bat. Its spectacles, while exhilarating most of the time, are rendered dull by repetition. Its drama, on the other hand, is as basic as dramas can get, with characters only going through the familiar motions and emotions all through a predictable end. 

A family affair 

Ray (Dwayne Johnson) is a war veteran who now operates rescue helicopters. He’s long been separated from his wife (Carla Gugino), who is now moving in with her boyfriend (Ioan Gruffudd), who is a renowned architect of skyscrapers. Meanwhile, his daughter (Alexandra Daddario), who lives with her mother and her mother’s boyfriend, is on her way to college. (READ: Ready for San Andreas)

Everything seems to be headed towards Ray and his wife’s eventual divorce when tremors started happening. The wife is stuck in Los Angeles, to be rescued by Ray on his trusted chopper. The daughter’s in San Francisco, the city that is to be predicted to be totaled by the earthquake, accompanied by a British lad (Hugo Johnstone-Burt) she just met, and his little brother (Art Parkinson). (READ: Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson is the ‘Selfie King’)

It is now up to Ray to muscle his way to his wife in Los Angeles, and to his daughter in San Francisco, just to make sure that his beloved family is safe.

Spectacle versus humanity

Again, it all sounds lovely, how San Andreas makes use of a feared cataclysm to tell what was hoped to be a tender story of a family man doing everything he can to cure the sins of the past. Sadly, the movie seems to be more enamored by conjuring spectacle after spectacle, at the expense of any comprehensible view of humanity.

Consider this one scene where Ray’s wife, while having lunch on top of one of Los Angeles’ skyscrapers, figures in the middle of a destructive tremor. Peyton’s camera follows her around as she finds her way to the rooftop where Ray will pick her up. The camera only loses sight of the wife when it gets distracted by spectacles, which is mainly composed of a man falling to his death, a chef being engulfed in flames, and other poor souls being turned into visual effects.

The scene, seemingly innocent, reflects the real interest of the film, which is to turn a realistic disaster into nothing more than entertainment. Even worse is how it portrays deaths without any hint of compassion, treating nameless individuals into opportunities to shock its audience the same way it does so with inanimate buildings falling apart.

Not guiltless

The movie is soulless, having exchanged its soul with cheap thrills and corny melodrama.

San Andreas is not guiltless a piece of entertainment as it thinks it is. In its effort to juggle the demands of a blockbuster and its focus on the story of Ray’s family, it neglects its responsibility to treat humanity with even just a semblance of respect. – Rappler.com

Francis Joseph Cruz litigates for a living and writes about cinema for fun. He is also a movie critic for Rappler. The first Filipino movie he saw in the theaters was Carlo J. Caparas’ ‘Tirad Pass.’ Since then, he’s been on a mission to find better memories with Philippine cinema.