Can Hollywood convey the real horror of disaster?
How many people would be killed if earthquakes destroyed Los Angeles, San Francisco and every town in between? Not to mention the giant Hoover Dam over in Nevada. Work it out. There are 18 million people living in greater Los Angeles alone. The San Francisco Bay Area holds about 7 million. California has close to 39 million in all. So I think we can agree on ‘‘many, many thousands or even millions’’ as an approximate total.
The reason I ask is that I watched a two-hour long film about this very subject and the death toll did not come up once. Should you expect it to? Or do you make a movie about what would easily be the most destructive natural disaster in human history and remain weirdly incurious about exactly how many people it would kill?
The film San Andreas makes a point of its disaster being the biggest disaster ever. Early in the movie, a university scientist played by the great Paul Giamatti, the best actor here by a long stretch, tells a terrified class about the big quakes of history. The worst ever recorded, he says, was one that hit Chile in 1960, with a magnitude 9.5. So the San Andreas quake naturally goes one better, right up to 9.6.
Giamatti’s Professor Lawrence Hayes is here as Hollywood’s archetypal ‘‘scientist they should have listened to’’. His research is in the still fictional field of predicting earthquakes by noticing ‘‘swarms’’. He warns his students that a colossal shake on the San Andreas fault is about 150 years overdue and could happen at any time. Like, even today, you mean? At the time of writing, San Andreas is the most popular movie with audiences in both New Zealand and the United States. It took $528,489 in New Zealand in just four days. We love to sit in the dark watching cities be destroyed and sometimes we are gluttons for imaginary punishment: the Hollywood Reporter noted that 19 out of the 20 top cinemas screening San Andreas in the US last weekend were in Los Angeles and San Francisco.
The one non-Californian cinema was in New York, which has been destroyed many times on screen and was probably relieved it was the West Coast’s turn again. New Zealand’s Motion Picture Distribution Association was unable to say if there have been similar spikes in Christchurch figures.
I counted 19 of us sitting in the cool dark at Readings Cinema in Shirley on Tuesday morning, ready to relive some recent trauma. It would be fair to guess that most were quake survivors, all with their own stories to tell and experiences to compare with what we were about to see.
Christchurch cinemas were disproportionately hit in 2011. We lost the Regent on Cathedral Square, the arthouse Academy and Metro in town, the Rialto and the Hoyts multiplex on Moorhouse Ave.
My own quake story involved the movies and one of those cinemas. I was more than halfway into the Coen brothers’ True Grit remake at the Hoyts multiplex when the February quake hit. I had to wait for the DVD to see how the film ended. The lights came up, the movie stopped, people walked and then ran through the lobby and no-one understood just how bad it was until they stepped onto Moorhouse Ave, avoiding the shattered glass doors.
I used to worry that day-time moviegoing was skiving. But there is a chance that being in a converted railway station, built to withstand the vibrations of freight trains, rather than in the old Press building saved my life. So now I embrace it.
Movies and quakes were already mixed up, long before San Andreas. As a kid in the 1970s, I sat in long-demolished cinemas in central Christchurch listening to Sensurround, a gimmick that pretended to shake the theatre with sonic vibrations. It was not just for quakes and other disasters, either: the starships in Battlestar Galactica rumbled past in Sensurround.
Effects have come a long way since, as San Andreas demonstrates. You get a lot of computer-generated bang for a US$110 million budget. That works out as NZ$153m, which means the film is still only about half the price of a Christchurch Convention Centre and arguably more fun.
The first quake happens within minutes and has immediate parallels for us in Christchurch. A young woman is driving dangerously while listening to Taylor Swift on a winding road above the steep San Fernando Valley. It looks just like the Summit Rd on the Port Hills.
Rocks fall from hills. The car goes off the road and tumbles into a crack in the Earth. She survives because this is a film in which people survive unsurvivable events. And not just people. Her iPhone survives being thrown around inside a falling car which is presumably how she summons Ray Gaines, a helicopter rescue pilot played by Dwayne Johnson, the actor formerly known as the Rock.
Ray has flown in Afghanistan. He has a news crew with him and two assistants.
He is the finest chopper pilot in Los Angeles which means the movie’s best stunts are helicopter stunts. He tips the chopper sideways and inches down the crevasse like that. It’s remarkable. He tears a door off the trapped car while he’s at it.
Johnson is the calmest of movie tough guys but he has good reason to be quietly angry and to take it out on an unsuspecting Subaru. When Ray gets back to his modest Pasadena bungalow, the camera shows us a pile of mail. Divorce papers, no less.
His soon to be ex-wife Emma (Carla Gugino) is moving in with millionaire property developer Daniel Riddick (Ioan Gruffudd). Daniel is about to fly Ray and Emma’s teenage daughter Blake (Alexandra Daddario) north to San Francisco on his private plane.
A private plane versus a beaten-up helicopter? It gets better. Daniel is financing the tallest building in San Francisco. Size matters in this manhood contest but at the same time, San Andreas is very obviously what they used to call a comedy of remarriage. Think of the classic His Girl Friday: Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell can’t stand to be together but can’t stand to be apart either. The chump who Russell’s character Hildy almost marries in the interim is an insurance salesman called Bruce from Albany, New York.
Film critic David Thomson described the insurance salesman in His Girl Friday as ‘‘one of American film’s most joyous insults to its own mainstream’’. In 2015 the insult is aimed at a property mogul who lives the same lifestyle as most of the people who produced the movie but will turn cowardly as soon as the real shaking starts.
Apologies for the spoiler, but Daniel gets unsentimentally flattened by a wellaimed shipping container. Cantabrians sick of the sight of shipping containers after four long years may applaud this novel use.
His ex-wife, played for mere seconds by singer Kylie Minogue, goes just as the first big quake hits Los Angeles. Tall buildings tumble and catch fire. Emma falls through four concrete floors and gets up again with barely a scratch. Tell that to the CTV families.
She does appear to be unable to form expressions with her face but that may be a Botox effect, not a quake injury.
Ray and Emma take the chopper to San Francisco. Thousands, possibly millions, are dead. As many again will be homeless and in urgent need of water and medical attention. So what does California’s best rescue pilot do? He leaves town on a single-minded personal mission.
There is nothing like a massive natural disaster to bring an estranged family together. There may be a huge crack in the Earth, but can the Rock open up emotionally?
You can probably accept the liberties that Hollywood inevitably takes with the science. A few real world geologists have fact-checked it.
For example, the biggest expected quake on the San Andreas fault would reach only 8.3 in magnitude not 9.6. A San Andreas quake could never create the monster tsunami that floods San Francisco late in the movie. Quakes do not create wide cracks as they are about tectonic plates rubbing together rather than separating. Even in a big quake, only one in 16 Los Angeles high rises would come down.
But then, who really knows? Wasn’t the one lesson from the Christchurch quakes that scientists don’t know everything, even the location of faultlines? Being surprised by an entirely new one is among the more plausible parts of San Andreas.
There is plenty to scoff at. I’m no physicist but I doubt that you really can lift a concrete beam from the roof of a crushed car with a tyre jack. But the idea that a rescue professional who trains for emergencies like this would do a runner is the hardest thing to believe in San Andreas.
Instead, the scientists and journalists emerge as heroes. That’s a message I can get behind.
As a viewer, I have a few basic problems with the overuse of computergenerated imagery. You can do anything inside a computer which makes none of it truly impressive. That’s obvious.
But also, the look is too clean. In a real quake, buildings don’t just collapse. There are clouds of dust, there are people trapped under rubble and others trying to dig them out. There are dead bodies.
The San Andreas disaster is sanitised, with none of the terrifying chaos and disbelief on the faces of survivors that you still notice in footage from the Christchurch quake. There is some debris in the water when San Francisco is flooded but where are the bodies? There would be hundreds, thousands of them, bobbing around. Dwayne Johnson would be steering his speedboat through Hell.
There are moral questions as well. How do you recreate or re-enact trauma or tragic experiences as entertainment? Destroying a version of New York all over again in yet another Avengers movie is one thing but imagining the worst possible outcome of a probable, even imminent natural disaster is another. San Andreas’ director Brad Peyton has previously helmed family entertainments ( Cats & Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore and Journey 2: The Mystery Island) and bloated, waterlogged corpses and crushed limbs were never going to be his thing.
Put simply, the tragic dimension is missing. Even Gaylene Preston’s largely disappointing Christchurch earthquake series Hope and Wire tapped into it, mostly by editing in TV3 news footage rather than trying to entirely restage the disaster.
I wrote at the time that Hope and Wire played like pallid re-enactments of moments that would have more power and truth as straight documentary. It was almost grotesque to see actors in fake dust and dirt staggering through recreated disaster zones alongside original footage of the places where real people died.
But at least Preston didn’t kill her story’s dodgy property developer, played by Joel Tobeck. Instead, the quake showed him how to be a better person.
The next question is an ethical one. Should this kind of thing be dramatised at all? I can’t have been the only one of the 19 likely quake survivors in the cinema who stopped to wonder why we were paying to watch destruction as entertainment.
At times like this I think about comments made by film-maker Claude Lanzmann, director of the legendary nine-hour-long Holocaust documentary Shoah. Lanzmann was against the use of archival footage or recreations and opposed Steven Spielberg’s Holocaust drama Schindler’s List because, he said, ‘‘a certain kind of horror cannot be conveyed’’.
He added: ‘‘I fail to see how actors could convey deported people who had suffered months, years of agony, misery, humiliation and who died for fear.’’
Similarly, what kind of reality can you expect from an extra who is paid for a day’s work as a quake survivor in a crowd scene, with burning buildings to be dropped in later by a guy on a computer?
Apart from some looting of big-screen TVs from stores on the road between Los Angeles and San Francisco, which gives Johnson a chance to finally punch somebody, the likely social effects are not touched on either. If Hurricane Katrina exposed bleak realities about race relations in the US, wouldn’t a much larger disaster in California be that much more revealing? Especially as it would hit African-American neighbourhoods in Oakland and Los Angeles.
But the final moments of San Andreas are more triumphant than tragic. They are strongly reminiscent of the ending of Oliver Stone’s 9/11 film World Trade Center, in which New York’s fighting spirit was reignited by disaster rather than doused.
At the end, the Gaines family, minus the property developer no-one mourns, is on a hill overlooking what is left of San Francisco, which is not much. Along the way, Blake formed a second, makeshift family with two British brothers, one of whom just arrived in San Francisco, hoping to work in engineering or design. Boy, did he pick the right day. ‘‘What now?’’ one asks. Cut to a quick shot of the Stars and Stripes fluttering in the breeze. ‘‘We will rebuild,’’ Ray says. You might want to yell a warning at the screen about what is really ahead: years of road cones and red zones, blueprints and housing shortages.
But there is some good news. It will be at least another 150 years before they can do a sequel.