See it at the Movies

SAN ANDREAS

with Joyce & Don Fowler
Posted 6/3/15

* * * ½ (JOYCE)

* * * (DON)

(Patented disaster movie)

They should give script patents to disaster movies. They have so much in common. You can usually count on spectacular special effects …

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See it at the Movies

SAN ANDREAS

Posted

* * * ½ (JOYCE)

* * * (DON)

(Patented disaster movie)

They should give script patents to disaster movies. They have so much in common. You can usually count on spectacular special effects in either 2D or 3D.

There’s at least one hero, and his first priority is saving his family, while thousands of faceless people die around him. There’s always a back story: a family crisis of some sort. And the good guys survive…usually all but one.

That’s the familiar plot for “San Andreas,” a disaster movie that makes us glad that we live on the East Coast.

Joyce bought into the plot and enjoyed it a bit more than I did. It has nothing to do with the fact that she thinks Dwayne Johnson is a “hunk.”

The two-hour movie starts with an unrelated helicopter rescue that establishes Ray (Johnson) as a truly skilled pilot and selfless hero. We learn that he has lost a daughter to drowning (“If you couldn’t save her, no one could,” his estranged wife, Carla Gugino, tells him.). Remember that, because water plays into the plot when a tsunami hits San Francisco Bay.

The divorce papers are ready to be signed and Ray’s wife is involved with a very rich builder of the biggest building in California (remember that, also.)

Ray’s daughter is abandoned by him, then saved by a young Englishman and his younger brother. (Remember that, too, when through a series of improbable coincidences they all reconnect.)

Paul Giamatti plays a seismologist who discovers he can predict large earthquakes at just the moment the 9.1 quake hits, turning the San Fernando Valley into one heck of a disaster area.

The plot was a bit too much for me to swallow, but Joyce, the Romantic, liked it.

The core of the movie revolves around the spectacular special effects, which include destruction of the Hoover Dam, the Hollywood sign and the Golden Gate Bridge, plus L.A. and San Francisco. I think we’ll stay on the East Coast.

Rated PG-13, with some profanity and intense scenes of mass destruction.

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