Movie Review: San Andreas

Introduction
In San Andreas, San Francisco is destroyed while a broken family is restored to wholeness. Dwayne
Johnson play as an L.A. fire and rescue chief who comes home after swinging from a helicopter and
pulling a blonde from a car perpendicular to the side of cliff a millisecond before the vehicle plunges
thousands of feet into the crevice to find divorce papers waiting. It seems that his wife, played by
Carla Gugino, is moving in with a Richie Rich architect (Ioan Gruffud) and bringing along their teenage
daughter, played by Alexandra Daddario. Fortunately for Dwayne, the San Andreas Fault cracks along its
entire length, sending millions of Californians and Nevadans to their deaths and giving him one last
chance to prove that he can be more present in his wife and daughters lives.

Once the big quake hits or one of them, anyway, the one that knocks over the Hollywood sign and
reduces downtown Los Angeles to a mess of glass, rebar and concrete Emma and Ray reunite to
search for their daughter Blake (Alexandra Daddario), who has gone up to San Francisco with Daniel on
her way back to college. (Another daughter, Mallory, drowned in a rafting accident some years before, a
trauma that contributed to her parents split and to their determination to rescue Blake.) Now he must
rescue his wife from the top of a crumbling L.A. skyscraper. Then he must fly with her to San Francisco to
rescue their daughter.

For reasons explained by the movies expert (a Caltech seismologist played by Paul Giamatti), the Big One
is heading for the Bay Area, so the panicked parents must race against the clock. Their daughter,
meanwhile, has befriended a pair of British brothers (Hugo Johnstone-Burt and Art Parkinson).

Review
As much as the critics say, the film is a bit enjoyable especially with the CGI that will mesmerize you with
amazing views that will make you wonder how a big quake can devastate Earth that much. Dwayne
Johnson truly delivered with his role by being full of energy and being charismatic throughout the movie.

The film also has some bad sides in it, example of which is the dialogues by the characters. Not that
theres a lot of time for canoodling or wisecracking. The dialogue (the script is by Carlton Cuse) consists
mainly of variations on Hurry up!, Get out of the way!, Oh my god! and, Lets go get our daughter.
Thats as it should be, of course. Eloquence is the first casualty of disaster, though the seismologist does
manage to issue a clear and cogent warning. And San Andreas, for its part, delivers a perfectly sensible
message: Listen to scientists.

The action in the movie is a series of problem-solving challenges, which are stressful, in a fun kind of
way, to observe. Every obstacle that a character has to conquer, it takes decision-making into account
and things that will be present into the other elements into the movie. The film offers a glimpse of hope
through the reunion of the family in the big quake, by being able to trust and rely on each other seems
to be the main strategy that the characters have used.

Though CGI has been mesmerizing, it seems of sort that CGI is only the main attraction of the film having
little to offer to character development, relationships, depth. When youre watching the movie, you
dont really feel obliged to feel the same way as the characters do. San Andreas certainly delivers the
goods, effects-wise, although no one over five will buy the part where Dwayne and Carla cruise through
downtown San Francisco in a motorboat while managing not to hit the floating remnants of the whole
city.

Movies like San Andreas are more enjoyable if, after every breathless, hairs-breadth cliff-hanger, you
holler, WHEW! THAT WAS CLOSE! and do a shot. The film is not, when taken in the right spirit, un-fun,
though getting in that right (derisive, camp) spirit requires desensitizing yourself to the possibility that
the horrors youre watching bear any relation to anything that could actually happen.

Relation
The filmed showed that a huge earthquake can truly deliver a blow to humanity once it occurs. The San
Andreas Fault is the most famous fault in the world. Its notoriety comes partly from the disastrous 1906
San Francisco earthquake, but rather more importantly because it passes through California, a highly-
populated state that is frequently in the news.

A fault is a planar crack in a rock along which slippage has taken place. Most faults are small - even
microscopic - and are not important. Some faults are many miles long.

The San Andreas Fault is a place where two tectonic plates touch, the North American and Pacific Plates.
The plates are rigid (or almost rigid) slabs of rock that comprise the crust and upper mantle of the Earth.
The SAF is about 700 miles long as the crow flies and about 800 miles long when its curves are
measured. It is roughly ten miles deep, and reaches from the Salton Sea in Imperial County to Cape
Mendocino in Humboldt County.

The plates are continually moving but where the touch each other, they get stuck. As the rest of the
plates moves, the stuck parts deform like compressing a spring so they build up stress in the rocks along
the fault. When the rock breaks or slips, the suddenly plates move, causing an earthquake. The entire
process is called elastic rebound. As they break and scrape by one another, they produce seismic waves
that travel through the ground and shake the surface. We know this shaking as earthquakes.