Here is my review of “San Andreas” in four words: the movie is trash. Now that that’s out of the way let me elaborate on a few points of interest.
San Andreas is about an earthquake that gleefully destroys much of LA and San Francisco. It is basically a revenge fantasy concerning the hubris of Californians. Look at the fine print of any Apple device and you’ll see the famous colophon, “Designed by Apple in California.” This alone should be enough to procure the wrath of the gods. At one point that phrase stood for a Kingdom-of-Berkeley-type anti-establishment self-assertion of goofy Californian autonomy.
Now it’s become an insufferable and braggy exceptionalism that flaunts its own affluence; as if “California” were some fragrant and magic zone of genius where only super-rich nerds live and boutique technologies grow out of the ground. San Andreas implicitly understands this and has taken means to show that most of the computers used in the movie are Mac books; the phones are iPhones. In this sense the glowing partially bitten Apple icon is a sign of doom.
Other signs of doom are the perpetual blue skies, swimming pools, high-powered architects and, weirdly enough, Kylie Minogue(!?). Ms. Minogue plays the bit part of a heavily groomed, haughty LA socialite whose meanness is tantamount to destruction. Her look of supercilious disgust is a clue to the viewer that they will enjoy watching her fall off a building.
Hubris here is the word of the day. A classical Greek hubris that entails, not just arrogance, but also willful ignorance. “Know that you are not one of the deathless gods,” was the common refrain in ancient Greece. So Greek literature is teeming with stories of over-reaching mortals who are brought low by the wrath of the gods.
San Andreas is no different. Obviously this kind of movie wouldn’t be made if the public were not already fantasizing about the destruction of California. The destruction of California sells. The perennial temperate weather, blue skies, swimming pools, the flat out easy living are transgressions that the rest of (fly- over) America deems worthy of apocalypse; our current fascination with a very real SoCal water shortage being the most recent example. The mortals of Hollywood and of Silicon Valley have been living like gods for too long and that requires vengeance.
Cue the earthquake. Or “seismic swarm” as the movie has it. Paul Giametti plays our resident scientist/doomsayer who declares early on that the question concerning a San Andreas superquake is not a matter of if but of when. The movie makes it clear that Paul Giametti is one of the mortals that knows he is not one of the deathless gods in a very humble and scientific manner. He functions as seer and chorus, explaining to the layman what kind of highjinks the earthquake is up to: “it’s heading for San Francisco!”
But for all the talk of seismic magnitude, how many millions of atom bombs are equal to 9.4 on the richter scale, the actual earthquake is not much to look at. Buildings collapse all over the place, tsunamis tower over urban centers, the golden gate bridge collapses into the bay. But it all comes off as being insipid and samey. It smacks of that same problem that plagues most CGI representations on the grand scale: all spectacle and no composition. This is the Hobbit movies great sin and seems to be our current big budget cinematic mode. It is as if these movies were all inspired by a “Where’s Waldo” aesthetic: depictions of a vast sea of meaningless, stupid detail.
Striding across this wasteland of signs-that-indicate-disaster comes the very large Dwayne “the Rock” Johnson. He is the hero of the movie and clearly is no mere mortal, but based on his size and flinty countenance can only be one of the deathless Gods. He is there to rescue his estranged wife and missing daughter.
Mr. Johnson tends to be, in general, very endearing. He still bears the earnestness, the sincerity, and simple emotions of the WWF. He cannot be troubled by introspection, nor irony. “All you have to do is find something big and stable and hang on,” is an actual line that he says in the movie. His recent instagram of himself standing beside a firetruck sums it up: “#courage, #integrity, #pride, #LAFD.” All of these sentiments are fine and they go along way toward making him a stand-up role model but they don’t help the movie any and are instead deadened in the attempt. No matter how earnest Mr. Johnson is when viewing the collapsing neighborhoods of LA, we still can’t shake the digital malaise: everything is just so goddamned fabricated.
Chalk another one up for why the wrath of the gods might fall on California.
Forest is a carpenter/writer living in Minneapolis. He writes a weekly horoscope for Revolver. Those can be found here. Follow him on Twitter @interrogativs
