Dwayne Johnson’s Underrated $474M Disaster Movie Praised By VFX Artists 9 Years Later

While plans for a sequel continue to linger in development hell, San Andreas gets a glowing retrospective review from the VFX artists at Corridor Crew. The 2015 movie starred Dwayne Johnson as LAFD rescue helicopter pilot Ray Gaines and follows him as he races to get from Los Angeles to San Francisco to rescue his daughter after a massive earthquake on the titular fault line causes devastating destruction all along the California coast. Also starring Carla Gugino and Alexandra Daddario, San Andreas saw mixed reviews from critics, but was a box office success, grossing over $474 million against its $110 million production budget.

Just over nine years after the movie first hit theaters, San Andreas became the subject of focus in the latest episode of Corridor Crew‘s “VFX Arists React” series. The group open up by initially remarking how “hilarious” the start of the movie’s tsunami sequence is as various boats race through the San Francisco Bay to climb the wave before it crests. Jordan Allen, in particular, remarks that the sequence is “entering Fast and the Furious territory ” with the somewhat ridiculous nature of the action, even while remarking how “beautiful” the simulated wakes are as the boats race up the wave.

The episode segment then transitions to show their reaction to the portion of the scene in which the Golden Gate Bridge is destroyed by the tsunami wave, with various cars and people being swept away and the bridge and its suspension cables warping under the pressure from the water. Allen eagerly expresses that his “eyes are eating good” with how detailed the effects are, while Sam Gorski remarks that the scene is “in the CGI hall of fame now” and Wren Weichman praising Scanline VFX as being “the masters of water” simulation. Though generally positive in their reviews, Weichman does point out one overall issue with the film’s tsunami scene. Check out what Weichman and the group said in the quote and video below:

There’s an element of this movie that’s unrealistic, surprise, surprise. The idea of this movie, San Andreas, is that there’s the San Andreas Fault line kind of going north through California here, and it gets the big one. A 9.5-scale earthquake, or whatever the freaking numbers are. It wouldn’t create a tsunami like this at all. So, someone simulated a tsunami hitting San Francisco, and theoretically, the highest tsunami you can possibly get in San Francisco is, like, 16 feet. Nothing about the tsunami in this movie is realistic at all, but the effects are great.

What Corridor Crew’s Analysis Says About San Andreas

The Movie Had The Appropriate Mix Of Implausibility & Realism

The San Andreas tsunami scene wasn’t the only of the disaster genre that Corridor Crew analyzed in the video above, having also taken a look at Deep Impact‘s and The Day After Tomorrow‘s. However, while their opinion was consistently positive across all three, even in spite of the decades that have passed since the latter two’s release, their analysis of The Rock’s movie does actually fall in line with how critics felt about the 2015 title. The movie currently holds a 49% approval rating from critics on Rotten Tomatoes, with audiences not proving much more positive at a 52% rating.

The majority of San Andreas‘ criticisms were directed at the implausibility of the movie’s depiction of the devastation caused by the titular fault line, with such scientific organizations as The American Geosciences Institute specifically criticizing the movie for “perpetuat[ing] geologic absurdities“. Beyond the preposterous nature of the disaster and sequences like a boat racing directly up a tsunami wave, the movie’s script was also critiqued for its underwhelming characters and dialogue. That said, even amidst the general mocking, San Andreas has generally been acknowledged for being an entertaining popcorn blockbuster, with critics’ sentiments about the movie’s CGI aligning with Corridor Crew’s.

Disaster Movies Don’t Need Accuracy To Be Entertaining

San Andreas certainly isn’t the only disaster movie to be lambasted by critics and scientific experts for the depiction of natural disasters. Michael Bay’s Armageddon was infamously deemed by Neil deGrasse Tyson as the movie that violated the most laws of physics per minute, until it was surpassed by Roland Emmerich’s Moonfall. Emmerich’s prior disaster movies have often been called into question for their science, even if some appreciation was shown for The Day After Tomorrow‘s attempts to raise awareness of climate change.

The Day After Tomorrow
recently became a hit on Netflix, landing the No. 6 spot on the week of September 9-15 and pulling in a total of 11.6 million hours viewed and 5.6 million total views.

But while accuracy can be appreciated in certain genres, San Andreas is a key example of why implausible storytelling can be acceptable, permitted the film as a whole proves entertaining. As a fan of the disaster genre, I truly appreciated just how visceral the 2015 movie was, as well as its mostly successful mix of tongue-in-cheek set pieces with genuinely horrifying action. While San Andreas 2 may never happen and build on the entertaining formula of the first, analysis from teams like Corridor Crew shows just how effective the movie remains nearly a decade later.

Source: Corridor Crew

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