“People love this idea of earth opening up and swallowing something up. While there will be secondary cracks in the earth, images of gaping openings are the stuff of imagination, not fact, Jones said. Science: Quakes are caused by tectonic plate moving against each other, not pulling apart, says seismologist Lucy Jones of the U.S. “San Andreas”: A yawning fissure that appears to be about 30 feet wide rips apart the California countryside. Even that magnitude is unlikely, unless there is movement along the vast majority of the fault, which runs much of the length of the state. Science: Estimates suggest that a temblor on the San Andreas Fault in California would top out at a maximum of about 8.3, said USC’s Jordan. The second cinematic shaker would be bigger than the 9.5 Chilean quake of 1960 that is the biggest in the history of such measurements. “San Andreas”: Two quakes, one magnitude 9.1 and one a 9.6 on the Richter Scale, devastate the West. While there is plenty of room for concern about real quake-related threats, the experts said their look at the “San Andreas” trailers suggests that the film and science will diverge in several places (Warning: SPOILERS): “I hope people have fun at the movie and an intense thrill ride,” Flynn said, “and then look up what they should be doing and what could really happen in a quake.” To enhance the chance of the latter, the film’s hero, Johnson, has filmed public service announcements in which he delivers the “drop, cover and hold on” safety mantra. And he believes it will inspire many to prepare their homes and offices and to become more supportive of seismic research. “But it’s not a documentary, and I have always been very upfront about that.”įlynn said, importantly, that his film will show how people should “drop, cover and hold on” in the midst of a quake. Producer Beau Flynn talked to Jordan and other experts early in the making of “San Andreas.” “There are things they are going to say are embellished,” Flynn acknowledged. “As long as people don’t think of it as realistic portrayal of what happens in a quake, we are OK. If you know what you are in for you will have a good time and you will be given back your money's worth, you won't want to be re-watching this movie anytime, but that is perfectly fine and fits the film in what it is trying to achieve.“I am looking forward to seeing this, and I am expecting to have a good time,” said Tom Jordan, a USC professor and director of the Southern California Earthquake Center. Moreover there is a great use of long takes in certain parts of the film, one in particular is very long and threw me right into the action like no other disaster movie ever had done before. It is used in the perfect dose, there is enough practicality involved and the fact that the set pieces aren't always the biggest most blown up ones made it better, it gave the film more stakes. I was riveted by many scenes and this is probably due to the fact that the director never overuses CGI. I counted actually two times where my mouth totally dropped in genuine amazement. The set pieces are for the major part breath-taking and original enough. With the exception of the finale where things are unnecessarily blown up to eleven, there isn't exaggeration. That being said, it does deliver the goods of a disaster movie and delivers them much more competently than the recent disaster films we have seen on the big screen. I cannot deny I was rooting for them, that maybe being due to the fact that the actors involved are honestly all doing a good enough job, but the fact that it tries to achieve character empathy through clichés that have been present in cinema since the beginning of time is ridiculous. The film tries too hard to give it's characters depth and barely succeeds in it. This mistakes really annoys me firstly because it repeats itself a dozen times in the film but most of all because it's worthless: it does not add stakes or tension, they would be exactly the same, but except for maybe twice in the film situations get resolved just in time and the uselessness of it really annoyed me. The usual cheesiness in disaster movie is there, the characters are so stereotypical it's hardly believable and worst of all it commits the usual, stupid mistake of having characters make it out of a situation just in time before everything collapses. If you understand what a disaster movie is about and how it works you will go and have a nice experience just as I did, certainly superior to the "2012" or "Day After Tomorrow" dullness.
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