San andreas

I read some of the reviews here and am wondering what all the negative reviewers expected. Who didn't know this was a huge, costly disaster movie? Who didn't know there were going to be many unbelievable scenes? Who didn't know there would be some cheesy dialogue?

Well, I, for one, enjoyed it. The last good disaster movie I saw was The Towering Inferno, and you know that was a long, long time ago. It's still my favorite disaster flick. San Andreas, of course, had much better special effects. (several decades later, better effects, right?) I thought the scenes of the destruction were amazing.

We all know disaster movies usually focus on a handful of people in it and this one was no different. The movie was entertaining for me. I hope it is for you, too. :)

Story: Man uses taxpayers' rescue service chopper to pick up his ex-wife and daughter while thousands die beneath them.

If you understand what a disaster movie is about and how it works you will go and have a nice experience just as I did, certainly superior to the "2012" or "Day After Tomorrow" dullness.

The usual cheesiness in disaster movie is there, the characters are so stereotypical it's hardly believable and worst of all it commits the usual, stupid mistake of having characters make it out of a situation just in time before everything collapses. This mistakes really annoys me firstly because it repeats itself a dozen times in the film but most of all because it's worthless: it does not add stakes or tension, they would be exactly the same, but except for maybe twice in the film situations get resolved just in time and the uselessness of it really annoyed me. The film tries too hard to give it's characters depth and barely succeeds in it. I cannot deny I was rooting for them, that maybe being due to the fact that the actors involved are honestly all doing a good enough job, but the fact that it tries to achieve character empathy through clichés that have been present in cinema since the beginning of time is ridiculous.

That being said, it does deliver the goods of a disaster movie and delivers them much more competently than the recent disaster films we have seen on the big screen. With the exception of the finale where things are unnecessarily blown up to eleven, there isn't exaggeration. The set pieces are for the major part breath-taking and original enough. I counted actually two times where my mouth totally dropped in genuine amazement. I was riveted by many scenes and this is probably due to the fact that the director never overuses CGI. It is used in the perfect dose, there is enough practicality involved and the fact that the set pieces aren't always the biggest most blown up ones made it better, it gave the film more stakes. Moreover there is a great use of long takes in certain parts of the film, one in particular is very long and threw me right into the action like no other disaster movie ever had done before.

If you know what you are in for you will have a good time and you will be given back your money's worth, you won't want to be re-watching this movie anytime, but that is perfectly fine and fits the film in what it is trying to achieve.

Sure, the movie has a lot of clichés, inaccuracies, common mistakes in destruction scenes (a suspension bridge's towers not bending outwards when the span is broken, for example), and a predictable plot, but these things go hand in hand with the disaster movie genre. If you expect those going in, then the movie is pretty entertaining. You're not supposed to take these films too seriously, you're just intended to go along with the ride of destruction--and what a ride it is! This movie has some excellent destruction scenes; although they aren't exactly realistic and don't always make sense, they're a lot of fun to watch, and that's the whole point.

Sure, if you compare this with all other films, it's not great; but in the disaster movie genre, with other such films as 2012, the Day After Tomorrow, and Greenland, it's actually pretty decent. Remember: the whole point of these movies is to show awesome scenes of destruction, and San Andreas does that beautifully, so don't take the movie too seriously and just go along with the ride.

My love of the disaster genre means that I can enjoy this type of movie despite the myriad problems with it, alongside the inherent cheesiness and the poor writing which makes it laughable in places. It pales in comparison to stuff from the 1970s like THE TOWERING INFERNO and EARTHQUAKE, but it's certainly better than modern SyFy Channel and Asylum offerings, even if that's just because of the massive budget alone.

The story is written so that the disaster scenes keep occurring throughout the movie. The CGI effects work is extensive, but it's also pretty good, and certainly better than in the awful 2012. Yes, you get all the flag-waving nonsense associated with this type of film, but you also get plenty of suspense scenes and depictions of post-earthquake devastation that you don't usually get to see in the movies.

Dwayne Johnson continues to be a hulking, mildly charismatic presence in the movies, although he's no Schwarzenegger. Alexandra Daddario is there for her looks and certainly succeeds in that respect. The rest of the cast don't fare so well, with Ioan Gruffudd virtually reprising his role from SANCTUM and Paul Giamatti on autopilot, although at least we get to find out what happened to Art Parkinson (the disappearing Rickon Stark from TV's GAME OF THRONES). SAN ANDREAS is certainly undemanding entertainment, and not a film I'm in any hurry to sit through again, but compared to other offerings in this packed sub-genre, it's not THAT bad.