"San Andreas" Review Thread
- Thread starter Tulin
- Start date
OMG! I can't believe people are making observations about events in the movie in the review thread for the movie! What is this nonsense?!
I'm pretty sure in the world we ALL live in, us weirdo outliers and the normals like yourself who can't stop themselves from throwing a temper tantrum anytime anyone expresses even a mild criticism of a film, there are plenty of examples of people in the military, police, fire/paramedics, etc. who recognized that they had a duty to perform and remained on the job even when they would much rather be home with their families.
I don't think anyone said they had a problem with him rescuing his wife, exclusively. It was rescuing his wife, rescuing no one else, and then leaving LA completely with the helicopter.
I think its a silly observation. But by all means, keep making it. As you infer, its your right.
There's a difference between putting off your duty to sit on the couch with the missus and watching the action on TV and taking the opportunity to save your spouse from a collapsing building. The complainers are treating it like he was doing the former.
This is actually the biggest problem with the complaint, because Ray never intended to just save the wife. He told her when she called to get everybody to the roof so that he could take off as many as he could, thereby doing the job he keeps being accused of abandoning. It's not his fault if his wife couldn't persuade anybody else to come with her.
And given that buildings higher up than the chopper was flying were falling all around them, it only makes sense to get the thing somewhere where that can't happen, namely out of the city.
Yes, that's when you go back to your airfield and the dispatcher says "OK, now go here and rescue this group of people" and so on for however long it takes to get people out of immediate danger. Crazy how that works.
If the helicopter isn't damaged and forced to crash on the way to the field, as it was in this instance.
And now I add the old saw: Did we watch the same movie?
I guess not. In the one I watched, he rescued his wife, got a call from his daughter while still hovering over crumbling downtown LA, and then immediately took off toward San Francisco. The helicopter crashed in Bakersfield (which honestly is a weird detour way to the northeast if you're trying to get from LA to SF in a hurry by air, but whatever). Unless the LAFD airfield is located way the hell out past Bakersfield 110 miles outside LA, which, no, he wasn't headed back to his airfield when it crashed. Plus, he had already explicitly said they were going to get their daughter at that point.
Anyway, this is stupid. No one's telling you not to like the movie, just don't flip your lid over a minor criticism and start talking about how "normal people" would interpret something. Seriously, you're throwing out a "you people aren't normal" over a silly disaster movie?
San Andreas
My Grade: B
A few weeks a go I was fairly rough on my grading of "Mad Max: Fury Road" and I still stand by that grade and my feelings on the movie. It was a movie I really enjoyed, it had great action scenes in it that looked wonderful and were exciting but I felt the movie really lacked in having characters I could latch onto and care about or having really much of a gripping story beyond "bad guys are chasing us. We need to get to this place, fast."
Then we have this movie, which uses the usual Hollywood disaster movies clichés and tropes that are all too common for a TV disaster movie or even Hollywood blockbusters Do I feel it's better than Fury Road?
Ehhhh..... I'm going to say the two movies are hard to compare against one another since they're both trying to do different things. In some ways I think I liked San Andreas more and in some ways I think Mad Max was an all around better movie. But if I were to buy one on DVD for repeat future viewings? It probably be San Andreas, I cannot think of a compelling reason to see Fury Road again. Are stock, clichéd, characters really that much of a difference? Not entirely, but it can sort-of break-up some of the tedium of extended action sequences and at least can give you some reason to care about what is happening on the screen beyond there just being pretty, flashy, things happening.
The movie takes place in Los Angeles and San Francisco (and points in between) when "the big one" hits the San Andreas fault line causing a series of massive earthquakes surpassing 9.0 on the Richter Scale, massive wide-spread destruction happens in and around the two major Californian cities as LA Fire Department rescue pilot Dwayne Johnson fights to save his estranged ex-wife and his daughter.
Naturally, there's the stock, cliché-filled moments between Dwayne and his ex-wife (not the daughter, though, who actually has a good relationship with her father in clear violation of standard trope protocols) whose relationship went sour in the wake of the death of their other teenage/young-adult daughter during a white-water rafting trip.
In usual disaster-movie format we follow different groups of people working to survive during the disaster, in this case Dwayne and his ex trying to get from LA to San Francisco to save their daughter, their daughter working in San Fran. to get to safety along with a gentleman she meets in the lobby of her would-be step-father's building, and naturally the "experts" who saw this all coming and want to warn the public about the danger that's yet to come.
Three, worn, pages out of the Hollywood Cliché Handbook. But somehow here it almost works, if only because Dwayne Johnson actually has a measure of screen presence to make him interesting and fun to watch as he goes around being Dwayne Johnson.
Unsurprisingly, the effects works in the movie is well done -even though I doubt it lines up with real-world seismology (I doubt flying over a massive earthquake would see the ground rolling around like when you play with that giant parachute in gym-class in grade school) and it even looks like there's some good in-camera effects and stunt work done. Not to the level of Mad Max, obviously, but it's still appreciated when it happens.
The closest thing this movie has to a villain is in the would-be new husband for ex-wife who's a charming businessman/architect played by Mr. Fantastic himself (or the "Wet Work" Craigslist guy from the first "Horrible Bosses" movie.) The movie seems to want us to seem him as "a" bad guy because he's, sort of, a rich asshole (when the daughter asks him about any kids he may have he says he does have kids, and shows her a picture of the newest building he's working on) but he actually comes across as genuine and even says he doesn't intend to try and replace her father. The "most" assholly thing he maybe does is abandon the daughter trapped in a car,but that's not entirely genuine because he abandons her, at first, to get more help then has a brush with death and then seems to mostly flee in terror. It's hard to entirely take him as an ass at that point, so the movie makes him go a bit over the line by pushing a stranger into some falling/flying debris in order to save himself. Cal in "Titanic" taking the abandoned child in order to secure a place in a lifeboat came across as more genuine dick-behavior than what Mr. Fantastic does here.
Through it all, I had a good, fun, time in the movie and it was pretty much what I was expecting. A cliché-filled ride that was just a visual spectacle. No more, no less. I really think a movie about the "Big One" could be done with some level of drama and seriousness without resorting to action/disaster movie tropes but, alas, that's not the world we live in.
I'd say worth seeing for a matinée or if you have a free-movie reward or something. In the end is it better than Mad Max? Probably not, but they're really different movies so it's not entirely fair to compare them. They're both going for different things and, really, are different genres. Just because you like one doesn't mean you can't like the other and vice/versa.
For me, though, it is sort-of nice to have characters with some lines and stories beyond grunts, growls, and sneers.
My Grade: B
A few weeks a go I was fairly rough on my grading of "Mad Max: Fury Road" and I still stand by that grade and my feelings on the movie. It was a movie I really enjoyed, it had great action scenes in it that looked wonderful and were exciting but I felt the movie really lacked in having characters I could latch onto and care about or having really much of a gripping story beyond "bad guys are chasing us. We need to get to this place, fast."
Then we have this movie, which uses the usual Hollywood disaster movies clichés and tropes that are all too common for a TV disaster movie or even Hollywood blockbusters Do I feel it's better than Fury Road?
Ehhhh..... I'm going to say the two movies are hard to compare against one another since they're both trying to do different things. In some ways I think I liked San Andreas more and in some ways I think Mad Max was an all around better movie. But if I were to buy one on DVD for repeat future viewings? It probably be San Andreas, I cannot think of a compelling reason to see Fury Road again. Are stock, clichéd, characters really that much of a difference? Not entirely, but it can sort-of break-up some of the tedium of extended action sequences and at least can give you some reason to care about what is happening on the screen beyond there just being pretty, flashy, things happening.
The movie takes place in Los Angeles and San Francisco (and points in between) when "the big one" hits the San Andreas fault line causing a series of massive earthquakes surpassing 9.0 on the Richter Scale, massive wide-spread destruction happens in and around the two major Californian cities as LA Fire Department rescue pilot Dwayne Johnson fights to save his estranged ex-wife and his daughter.
Naturally, there's the stock, cliché-filled moments between Dwayne and his ex-wife (not the daughter, though, who actually has a good relationship with her father in clear violation of standard trope protocols) whose relationship went sour in the wake of the death of their other teenage/young-adult daughter during a white-water rafting trip.
In usual disaster-movie format we follow different groups of people working to survive during the disaster, in this case Dwayne and his ex trying to get from LA to San Francisco to save their daughter, their daughter working in San Fran. to get to safety along with a gentleman she meets in the lobby of her would-be step-father's building, and naturally the "experts" who saw this all coming and want to warn the public about the danger that's yet to come.
Three, worn, pages out of the Hollywood Cliché Handbook. But somehow here it almost works, if only because Dwayne Johnson actually has a measure of screen presence to make him interesting and fun to watch as he goes around being Dwayne Johnson.
Unsurprisingly, the effects works in the movie is well done -even though I doubt it lines up with real-world seismology (I doubt flying over a massive earthquake would see the ground rolling around like when you play with that giant parachute in gym-class in grade school) and it even looks like there's some good in-camera effects and stunt work done. Not to the level of Mad Max, obviously, but it's still appreciated when it happens.
The closest thing this movie has to a villain is in the would-be new husband for ex-wife who's a charming businessman/architect played by Mr. Fantastic himself (or the "Wet Work" Craigslist guy from the first "Horrible Bosses" movie.) The movie seems to want us to seem him as "a" bad guy because he's, sort of, a rich asshole (when the daughter asks him about any kids he may have he says he does have kids, and shows her a picture of the newest building he's working on) but he actually comes across as genuine and even says he doesn't intend to try and replace her father. The "most" assholly thing he maybe does is abandon the daughter trapped in a car,but that's not entirely genuine because he abandons her, at first, to get more help then has a brush with death and then seems to mostly flee in terror. It's hard to entirely take him as an ass at that point, so the movie makes him go a bit over the line by pushing a stranger into some falling/flying debris in order to save himself. Cal in "Titanic" taking the abandoned child in order to secure a place in a lifeboat came across as more genuine dick-behavior than what Mr. Fantastic does here.
Through it all, I had a good, fun, time in the movie and it was pretty much what I was expecting. A cliché-filled ride that was just a visual spectacle. No more, no less. I really think a movie about the "Big One" could be done with some level of drama and seriousness without resorting to action/disaster movie tropes but, alas, that's not the world we live in.
I'd say worth seeing for a matinée or if you have a free-movie reward or something. In the end is it better than Mad Max? Probably not, but they're really different movies so it's not entirely fair to compare them. They're both going for different things and, really, are different genres. Just because you like one doesn't mean you can't like the other and vice/versa.
For me, though, it is sort-of nice to have characters with some lines and stories beyond grunts, growls, and sneers.
Try reading beyond the first couple paragraphs.
I'm the opposite. I love being able to see places I've been to a bunch of times get obliterated by aliens, earthquakes, and giant mutant spiders, and I like being able to point out the mistakes in depictions of geography and culture, though I see where you're coming from.
But you're right that it's probably best to save your money on this one and wait for cable. It's not without it's enjoyable moments, but it's not great either.
