It's the anti-"Mad Max" movie. Every disaster film trope in the book. Clichéd, derivative, terrible acting and inappropriate line deliveries. I actually said lines of this film out loud before the characters did, right up to the end, "Now we re-build." I SWEAR I ACTUALLY said this line out loud, about two seconds before the Rock says it. A police rescue chief who commandeers a helicopter and goes derelict of duty to go rescue his whiny wife and 35 year old looking "teenaged" daughter, when he could've saved HUNDREDS of other lives. Just terrible. Awful. Save your money and go see a REAL movie again - give your money to "Mad Max".
I'm glad to see nobody else offering a review, which hopefully means you're heeding my advice. Well done! P.S. I'm assuming spoilers don't matter for his shitty movie so I'll add - at one point The Rock needs to do CPR on his daughter and it looks like it's not working. I was hoping he'd stand up, cock his eyebrow and jump on her with The People's Elbow, from his wrestling days! This movie's so bad, I wouldn't have been surprised if he had!
I've already seen Mad Max. And Tomorrowland. There's nothing left this month. Everything in the above review is true, except I enjoyed myself. It was like watching a Syfy channel disaster flick, only with good sfx! It was especially nice of Carla Gugino and Alexandra Daddario to keep their tatas shaking even when there was no quake. That made it worth the price of a ticket.
I never intended to see this movie, so don't worry. I've seen this movie in several different forms, they're all the same.
There's a scene where The Rock and Threshold are driving along the highway, following a sequence of mass destruction. Bearing in mind their first daughter drowned years before, Threshold suddenly turns to Rock and says in this offhand voice, "Do you ever wonder what it'd be like if our daughter never died?" It's a TERRIBLE line with the WORST delivery you could imagine. Imagine the kind of delivery you'd use if you were saying to your partner, "Do you ever wonder what it'd be like if we used non-brand fabric softener?" I simultaneously laughed and was appalled - it's FUCKING TERRIBLE. Oh, but it gets worse. The Rock is the chief of police rescue or something. They're driving down this highway and suddenly Threshold screams. Why did she scream? The Rock didn't notice it but just up ahead, there's a truck stop that's all but fallen into the now exposed San Andreas fault. If Threshold hadn't screamed for him to stop, The Rock would've just kept driving into the massive fissure in the Earth. I'll repeat that for those not keeping score - The Rock didn't see THE FUCKING GAPING SAN ANDREAS FAULT just up ahead!!!!!!! Six kinds of fucking stupid!
The only way to watch this movie would be the way I watched 2012; used a free DVD rental, fast-forwarded literally anytime a character spoke and watched just the action sequences.
Ok, well, I enjoy---or have enjoyed---disaster movies a lot growing up. I still *love* The Poseidon Adventure with Gene Hackman and The Towering Inferno. I also remember enjoying, to a lesser degree, Dante's Inferno and Earthquake. But I've also seen a lot of forgettable ones. Deep Impact and Armageddon both sucked as I recall. Volcano was mediocre. The Poseidon remake was horrendous despite the presence of Kurt Russell and Richard Dreyfus, (I didn't see the made-for-tv-remake). And speaking of Poseidon, the 1979 sequel with Michael Caine was pretty bad, though there's a sort of so-bad-it's-almost-watchable quality to it, but it still took me SUPREME efforts to get through it.) Wasn't there a disaster movie not too long ago featuring John Cusack?
I have seen the film. Ray Gaines (Dwayne Johnson) was the head of the LAFD emergency aerial rescue section. He was taking a helicopter to a maintenance depot when the quake struck. It would have been good to have a scene where it shows him attempting to discover what happened to his comrades. This was a failure of the film. There are several geographic errors in the film. Nob Hill is not the tallest point in the city - that is Mount Davidson, followed by the Twin Peaks. The TP, which are close to downtown, are 910 feet (280 meters) high. Nob Hill is 376 feet (115 meters) high. I know San Francisco, and I would never go out onto the street where the skyscrapers are located during an earthquake. The glass falling from the skyscrapers might kill you. It's best to stay inside. The sequence with the tsunami was questionable. The speedboat piloted by Ray I think would have been overturned by the wave, like the larger yacht next to it. And the cargo ship had immense proportions. It seemed overly large for a ship of this type. Furthermore, the tsunami would be slamming against the whole coastline of the peninsula and not just the city's shoreline and the GGB. When Ray's boat was moving next to the boat, it felt like a video game I have played before, where I had to dodge items falling from a height which could kill me. I think it was one of the Call of Duty games - I was a soldier in Washington, DC and I had to dodge falling helicopters. It seemed they attempted to minimize the damage done to SF, so that the main characters would survive. Under what was established in the film, and from knowning the city, none of them would have survived. Another sequence that reminded me of a video game was when the wife's boyfriend was squashed by a container. In F.E.A.R.: Perseus Mandate, the character Gavin Morrison is squished by a truck. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8szATkFkkBI) I think Mad Max has been the best summer film of this year, followed by Avengers: The Age of Ultron.
I dunno...I go to the movies to be entertained. Bang bang shoot 'em up movies with long sequences of violence and car chases (i.e. Furious 7, Mad Max) don't really entertain me personally and I wouldn't put my money towards them by seeing them in theaters. While they may be thin on plot and characterization disaster movies like San Andreas do entertain me. I admit San Andreas was a bit...repetitive. It basically took elements of The Day After Tomorrow and 2012 and threw in The Rock as lead character. I don't think the science was all that accurate (wouldn't the magnetic signatures they used to track these pre-quake surges mess with any and all electronics in the area? That and the whole freakin' state getting hit at once...really?). I dunno, I know I was on the edge of my seat worried about what would happen to the characters (even if some of it was ridiculous...riding the tsunami out by cresting it first?). I definitely don't think it's the biggest, best movie of the summer (Age of Ultron holds that spot for me still) but it was a pleasant way to spend 2 hours yesterday morning.
I enjoy low brow cliched movies but DEAR GOD this was the cliched movie to top all others. It's particularly funny that The Rock is starring in it because he's the star of the parody of action movies in the Disaster ride at Universal Studios. The only cliche they forgot to throw in was the asshole city official who refuses to listen to the scientist warning them about the eminent disaster
I call them the "You must suffer for your hubris" character, because they almost always wind up being gruesomely killed by the disaster they earlier denied later on in the film. Notable exceptions include the Vice President Dick Cheney analogue in The Day After Tomorrow. I guess the closest thing here would be Mr. Fantastic, who was decent enough at first that it seemed like he might buck the trend of being the douchy new boyfriend who has to die in order for the "hero" to get back with his estranged wife (Gordon from 2012 almost survived till the end), until halfway through the movie when he just abandons her daughter completely, and therefore had a hug from a cargo container with his name on it later in the film. As far as someone denying the seismologist's claims, I wonder if there wasn't a scene cut from the film, because after the Hoover Dam quake (seriously, Paul Giamatti had tons of time to grab his friend) Giamatti says they have to "warn everybody," but no warning goes out before the Big One hits LA. And then later, when the warning of an even bigger series of quakes hitting San Francisco happens, he decides to take matter into his own hands by having his students hack the news feed so he can get in contact with the reporters on the desk directly and get put on their air. So I'm wondering if there wasn't a missing scene earlier where a news director refused to put him on because he didn't believe he could predict the quakes or something (which is perfectly reasonable in the real world, but not in disaster-movie-land). Well, the "hero" abandons his post as an LA Fire Rescue pilot during the biggest disaster in the city's history, steals and crashes an LAFD helicopter and doesn't rescue anyone but his wife in the process, and then loots a mini-mall and steals a car (albeit from other looters who had stolen it from a decent person), so it kind of is GTA: SA.
I did find it hilarious the fire/rescue hero pilot, at the outset of a great disaster, promptly abandons his post and steals his helicopter, thus dooming dozens of people he would have saved to death just to save his ex-wife and daughter who isn't even in the same damn city. And in the real world, can a person really set a helicopter to "hover" and leave it sitting perfectly level with no pilot at the helm?
Wasn't that the movie where they ran up the stairs of the building outrunning the super freezing weather that was rising (slower than they were running though).
Initially, Ray Gaines didn't steal the helicopter. He was taking the helicopter to a maintenance depot. It is debatable if he stole the helicopter after he picked up his wife. This issue should have been addressed in the film. Helicopters don't have autohov at the present time. However, they could have this capacity in the future. This is not an issue for me - the San Andreas world is not my world. I do have trouble with the tsunami, as it is established that boats bigger than the speed boat were being flipped over by the wave. When I see the boats and ships heading to the wave, I am asking, "Are they making a banzai charge at the wave?" It didn't turn out well for the Japanese.
Some top-of-the-line military helicopters with extensive computerized controls like the Apache can auto-hover for a brief time while firing missiles or observing enemy movements, but you'd never set it into that mode and then not pay attention to what's happening, because things can go wrong quickly. An LAFD Huey with a conventional switches and gauges-only cockpit would not have a sophisticated computerized control system like that though.
I can't believe all the griping about Ray's use of the helicopter. I don't know what world you people live in, but in the one I'm in - the one that's inhabited by normal human beings - nobody is so altruistic that he'll give up the possibility of saving someone he loves just to fly to a maintenance depot - that the quake might have destroyed anyway - to get the chopper work done, get a team together and then after all that go out and try to save a bunch of total strangers. EX-WIFE: "I'm trapped in a high-rise that's falling!" RAY (according to you people): "Sorry babe, but it's my sworn duty as a rescue chief to go off and save a bunch of total strangers on the other side of town. Hopefully one of my dutiful colleagues will reach you before the building drops. Love you!" There's lots of problems with the movie. That ain't one of them.