Terremoto: A Falha de San Andreas

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

I'm a sucker for a disaster film, I pretty much love all of them but I do have 'some' limitations.

This one does enough to stay on the good side of the ledger.

What works, the effects (mostly) and The Rock. What doesn't, The Rock and the Disney-fying of anyone dying.

What do I mean? The Rock is hit and miss in this one, he pulls of some great scenes whereas others are just a bridge too far (he may have caught this from Fast Furious). The effects are excellent. The deaths are sanitised for perhaps younger viewers, the cost of this is tension and any real concern you may have had for the family. They are obviously going to come out ok so we don't have to explain anything to the kiddies!

But a disaster movie is a disaster movie so thumbs up from me!

In every sense of its existence this is the prototypical disaster movie, right down to the use of the Rock as the lead character. With that being said I would say it's on the better side of average in terms of his performance.

The movie starts off by allocating a decent amount of time to a couple scientists who discover a new way of predicting earthquakes (which isn't ever really explained how). It's then said that nobody had really listened to them in the past but we don't really observe that part as viewers. The lead scientist is also credited with saving many lives even though his advice to run away was communicated as the disaster was already unfolding. Furthermore we really don't see many who survived at all except the one family.

Overall it is very corny , but in the same light it is highly entertaining . The action sequences transition smoothly and keep your attention the entire time which is mostly what you are looking for with this type of movie.

Sort of like a theme Park ride in a sense. Don't expect an outstanding backstory but enjoy everything it throws at you.

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.

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. :)