Watchmen - The Ultimate Cut

Under The Hood

Watchmen - The Ultimate Cut
USA 2009+ Directed by Zack Snyder
Warner Brothers/Paramount Pictures 
UK Blu Ray

Warning: Lots of spoilers, I’m sure

Watchmen was one of three heavily influential comic books of 1986 which kinda changed the face of comic books thereafter. They were DC’s Watchmen, DC’s The Dark Knight Returns and, to a lesser extent although it’s certainly not a lesser comic, Marvel’s Elektra Assassin. It’s said that because of the two DC titles, comic books finally grew up to reach a new adult audience. Which is actually a bit wrong or, as I would say myself, total nonsense. There were always Adult comics around such as the 1960s Underground Comics and even, of course, the Tijuana Bibles prevalent in the 1920s to 1960s (which are referenced in a neat scene in Watchmen). Not to mention stuff like Metal Hurlant (aka Heavy Metal) and Marvel imprints like Epic and the comic book magazine that it was named after.

So, to be a little more accurate, this was when superhero... or rather... costumed hero orientated comics grew up... at least in the mainstream. Now I was a year or two late to the party and so I read collected editions of these titles and a few other important landmarks during 1987 and 1988, generally perceived, as I said, as also being touch points for the maturation of the ‘four coloured funnies’. So I was also reading stuff like Batman - The Killing Joke, Blood - A Tale and Stray Toasters around this time. The comic was written by the great Alan Moore who, as far as I know, has never seen the movie version and has, like all the other movies based on his comics, had his name taken off the credits. He originally wanted to tell his story with the Charlton Comics characters that DC had, relatively recently at the time, bought but, when the company realised just how dark he was going to go with them, Moore was encouraged to create new heroes instead. 

And then Zack Snyder made a Watchmen movie in 2009 and, he did an amazing job with it. 

It wasn’t the first time it had been attempted, most famously by Terry Gilliam who, after a while, declared it unfilmable. I’d have to say that Snyder definitely proved the naysayers wrong. It’s an impressive movie and there are just a few changes, other than things which just build on ideas already present in the original 12 issue mini series. 

It’s basically a whodunnit, where the group of ‘once costumed heroes’ who are retired in this alternative version of history, due to current president Richard Nixon (still president in the 1980s in the story) making costumed vigilantes illegal (and idea which was also used in The Dark Knight Returns comic from the same year as Watchmen), have to solve a murder of one of their own. 

Two generations of costumed heroes are depicted with the main players being... Rorschach (Jackie Earle Haley who lobbied for the role and was the only one who’d read the original comic mini series before being cast), Patrick Wilson as the second generation Nite Owl, Carla Gugino as the original Silk Spectre, Malin Akerman as the second generation Silk Spectre, Billy Crudup as Dr. Manhattan, Matthew Goode as Ozymandias, Jeffrey Dean Morgan as The Comedian and Stephen McHattie as the original Nite Owl (who has published a book about the early days of the Minutemen - as the team of first generation heroes was called in the 1940s - called Under The Hood) and a whole host of others. Patrick Wilson is maybe not quite as dumpy as Nite Owl II is supposed to be but, he and all the others do an absolutely terrific job in a film which is absolutely densely packed with details. 

The opening credits montage, after the murder of The Comedian, is a wonderful snapshot of the 1940s through to the 1960s and fills the viewer in on some of the themes which will come up. Almost all the heroes are heavily flawed with, absolutely no doubt that the Comedian... who shot a woman carrying a baby in her womb, tried to rape Silk Spectre (and there’s a nice twist in that later in the story) and killed many innocents in both the Vietnam war (which America won in this version, because the US had Doctor Manhattan, walking in a giant sized version of himself and exploding people with his thoughts while Wagner’s Ride Of The Valkyries plays, in a direct reference to Apocalypse Now) and after, certainly deserving to die... but also the only one perceptive enough to see what is coming before it happens... and is killed for his trouble. Although, of course, Dr. Manhattan probably also knows because he doesn’t perceive time linearly like most people.

Like the comic, the film plays as a mystery in terms of who killed The Comedian and... is someone targetting ex-masked heroes or is something else even more world threatening going on? I won’t reveal who is behind everything but the film has a tragic ending in a way, with one of the heroes who gets obliterated by one of two of his allies having the last laugh in terms of a journal he kept and mailed to a newspaper... although if its taken seriously, it could also mean the end of the world!

It’s about corruption and people selling out and, ultimately, people deciding to do the wrong things for the right reasons. It’s very, very dark and is the second greatest superhero movie ever made (I still count Wonder Woman as the greatest). It’s one of the best things Zack Snyder ever did (certainly much better than his modern DC movies) and the Ultimate Cut, which I’d not seen before, brings it even closer to the comic book. While the Under The Hood text story back ups from each issue are not used, the Ultimate cut, which runs for around three and a half hours, puts in the comic book within a comic book, Tales From The Black Freighter, that the kid from the news stand keeps reading in the original source. I was worried these cartoon segments were going to look silly cut into the live action but the director does a really good job and they don’t stick out like a sore thumb unless the edit makes them do that when they’re supposed to. It’s all integrated very nicely. It also captures the tone of an old EC horror comic book from the 1950s really well, although the actual comic cover the kid is reading in the film marks it out as a DC comic. 

When the movie initially came out, I was angry that the original ending of a fake tentacle monster invading Earth to unite the nations in peace was replaced by an energy bomb which equally kills millions instead of invading aliens. But, reflecting on this, it might have seemed silly to an audience used to more sophisticated effects and plot mechanisms and I can see why they did it. But it’s a brilliant movie and many of the shots from the comic books (plus alternate pop culture incidents) are lovingly crafted in some of the most beautiful colour palettes and transitions rendered in film history...

The opening shot of the comic, which tracks up from The Comedian’s badge with the drop of his blood on the eye so we can see it laying in the blood from his splattered remains, where his body fell from being pushed from the window, doesn’t appear right at the start of the movie like the comic but it is recreated here later (the badge with the blood splash in the comic would be quickly acquired as a symbol of the Acid movement in 1980s and 90s music culture and I always found it amazing that none of the kids I met who wore the badge had any idea it was related to a comic book). 

Like the comic, the film shifts to cross-cutting between various sets of characters, as each issue was used to highlight a character in turn. So you get various characters dealt with in more detail at different points in the movie. My favourite sequence... which was also one of my favourites from the original comic... is where we see the man who became Dr. Manhattan obliterated in a nuclear accident and then gradually, over many months, rebuild himself out of nothing into the being he is now... all set to a couple of needle dropped pieces from the Philip Glass score to Koyaaniqatsi. It’s good stuff. 

It’s a film of wonder and horror and, I think, fully deserves the 18 rating the film got in the UK. It’s also one of the great works of art in cinematic history and I’m surprised people aren’t still talking about it. Like the comic it’s based on, though, it’s a very rich, dense text and probably a lot of stuff is missed in a casual viewing of the material. And that’s about as much as I want to say about Watchmen - The Ultimate Cut, I think. I could probably write a lot more, actually but it would end up like a thesis and I don’t want to go down that route, for sure. However, this will be rediscovered and hailed as the classic it is one day, I’m sure, but in the meantime... Who Watches The Watchmen? 

Gunpowder Milkshake

Dinergeddon

Gunpowder Milkshake
France/Germany/USA 2021
Directed by Navot Papushado

Warning: Some light spoilers here.

Wow, what a great action movie. I’ve been a huge admirer of Karen Gillan ever since she charmed our hearts and minds as Amy Pond in Doctor Who. She’s finally making some success of it in Hollywoodland now, with roles like Nebula in multiple Marvel Cinematic Universe films and, okay, the odd thing like the Jumanji reboot (a film for which I’ve still not had the heart to publish my review and, I will one day but, to sum up my thoughts on that one... bloody awful... but she was still good in it, even if she couldn’t save the picture). Since I saw her in the opening of Stuber (reviewed here) and she played the all action cop partner who was fridged right at the start of the film to motivate the main character, I’d been wondering when the fine folks in Hollywood were finally going to let her head up an action vehicle and, yeah, Gunpowder Milkshake is an almost perfect film with which to do it.

The plot is very simplistic, which means there are no ‘I saw that coming an hour ago’ reveals and it really is just a string of big action set pieces strung together with the bare bones of a story. Here, she plays a very successful hit woman working for ‘The Firm’. Her mother, played by the equally wonderful Lena Heady, kinda ran out on her when she was young and she was subsequently brought up by one of the higher ups in The Firm to be... well... just like her mother. The film opens with a mostly absent action sequence which is continually referred back to throughout the film in which, due to bad instructions, she kills the son of the head of a criminal organisation. She then compounds the mistake by not recovering some stolen money but also by rescuing a young girl, aged 8 and three quarters and played by Chloe Coleman, whose father she also mistakenly killed.

And then, both the heads of rival criminal organisations want her out of the way and so she goes to borrow weaponry from three former associates (I’m simplifying for the sake of brevity here) at a library which specialises in firepower... played by another three big action names, Michelle Yeoh, Angela Bassett and Carla Gugino. Along the way, while protecting the newly orphaned child, she also reunites with her mother and, long story short, the six women fight back against the huge groups of assassins coming for them.

And it’s just a wonderful movie. Giving us a diner where people have to check their guns in, a library where people can check guns out and, eventually, leading us back to the diner... where many people get checked out. The chemistry between the actors and the wonderful dialogue they perform is top notch (even Michael Smiley gets a look in and, as for the representative for 'The Firm', it’s Paul Giamatti, ‘nuff said!) but even that pales in comparison to the absolutely wonderful mise en scène of the thing. It’s like a colourful, poppy comic book tapping into a vague noir thriller sensibility and then mixed liberally with a fair few spaghetti western tropes into the bargain. I knew I was in good hands when Gillan returns home at the start of the movie, opens the fridge and there’s a wonderful shot looking at her from inside the fridge which then tracks down from one shelve to the one below it in a smooth camera movement. Another great shot, which acts by way of an establishing shot, is when we are caught up with the aftermath scene of her character’s unfilmed mistake and the room full of carnage is viewed through the vertical rectangle of an open doorway surrounded by blackness at the centre of the wide screen ratio, the rectangle widening out slowly as the camera zooms in.

There’s some beautiful use of colour too, with a very bright palette of combined primaries which occasionally gives way to a frame which is purely infused with just one colour, such as red washing over the shot. This film goes for a full on eye candy approach which, when coupled with the rich sound design and beautifully choreographed action sequences, makes for a very seductive viewing experience.

There are some nice things I hadn’t seen here before too, including a scene where the kid has to help Gillan’s character because both her hands have been numbed but she has to get into a big fight and, similarly, because of the same reason, she has to help the child drive her car in a cat and mouse car chase in an interior car park. It’s good, inventive stuff and well worth a look, even for the most jaded action fans... and it doesn’t hurt that it has a warm heart beating at the story’s centre either.

And as for Frank Ilfman’s incredible score... well. It starts off really well with a theme made of five note melodic segments played on, what sounds to me, like a cimbalom (or something near to that). It’s used quite a lot in the early part of the movie but then, starting with a scene which itself has big ‘showdown eye’ moments reminiscent of a Sergio Leone spaghetti western, there's what sounds like either a sample or rerecording of the ‘we can fight’ chorus from Morricone’s score for that director’s A Fistful Of Dollars... as we are presented with a beautiful action cue that acts as an ‘homage with a beat’ to various Morricone scores, including a chime which has the same orchestral punctuation of the pocket watch chimes in For A Few Dollars More and some spots which glue the music together in the style of Edda Dell'Orso’s kick ass vocals for films like The Good, The Bad and The Ugly and Once Upon A Time In The West. It’s a wonderful cue which scores a fight in Gutterballs Bowling Alley (a reference to The Big Lebowski, perhaps) and, although two of the major action scenes use needle dropped songs to back them up, there is a lot of the Morricone influenced stuff in it and while the song which scores the slow motion fight at the diner is fine, it’s heavily preluded by a typical Morricone-esque showdown opener which Ilfman manages to pull off with a certain amount of style. I’ve heard other composers try to do this on occasion and, sometimes fail to keep the spirit without overly copying from the late, great Italian maestro.

And if that wasn’t enough, in a shootout scene about halfway through the movie, the four bad guys are wearing latex masks of the ‘big four’ Universal monsters... Dracula, Frankenstein, The Mummy and The Wolfman... culminating in a scene where Gillan violently despatches the 'Dracula dude' in the exact manner befitting his original counterpart (perhaps more in line with the way Hammer would do it, in terms of graphic violence). It’s not a subtle movie for sure but... it is very welcome.

And that’s all I’ve got to say right now about Gunpowder Milkshake. If you are a fan of action movies which have beautiful cinematography, great actors, a nice bit of scripting and some wonderful music, then you really can’t go wrong with this one. I just hope this one makes it onto Blu Ray at some point because I’m chomping at the bit to grab this one as soon as it comes out. A highly recommended, explosive beverage of a movie, for sure. 

The Haunting Of Hill House

Eleanour Handbasket

The Haunting Of Hill House -
Extended Director’s Cut
10 episodes. 2018
Directed by Mike Flanagan
Paramount Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: This one has spoilers for pretty much all iterations of Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting Of Hill House.

Well this is going to be a hard one to write about because, in some ways, it feels almost like a personal attack on one of my favourite movie adaptations, the great 1963 version of The Haunting (which I reviewed here), based on Shirley Jackson’s novel The Haunting Of Hill House. Easily the best horror movie ever made and I suspect that’s why horror director Mike Flanagan, who I actually find fairly hit and miss, was so drawn to it. Everybody loves this novel/movie and, if you can get it right, it’s one of the scariest things you could do.

Alas, I’ll be up front here and say the reason why I’m torn on this new TV series ‘adaptation’, for want of a better word, is that it happens to be a quite well made TV show while, at the same time, having almost nothing in common with the original text.

That’s not to say the original text doesn’t make it into this iteration. It’s peppered all over the place throughout the series, just in completely different context. Richard Johnson’s opening delivery of Shirley Jacksons words, for example, open the series but this time spoken by the character Steven Crain and it is he who speaks dead Eleanour’s (Nell’s) lines at the end of this version.

Other examples would be the repeat dialogue from caretaker Mrs. Dudley’s line reading... “In the night... in the dark.” At least it’s, most of the time, Mrs. Dudley’s character who is saying it throughout the series here but there are a lot of lines of dialogue which are taken out of the mouths of others and given to different characters with a completely different context to the words... kinda like a fanboy homage to the original. Which in some way, I can’t really blame the writers for.

And as for the “Oh God, who’s hand was I holding!” moment, which was so terrifying in the 1963 adaptation (even though it was used as a highlight of the trailer), it’s referenced here at least twice by different characters. It’s like they wanted to have two different ways of giving us the same kind of scare (which is truly terrifying in the novel and original film version) but failing in the scare department and indulging themselves twice.

Not to mention a load of name drop references to people and things associated with the legacy... such as the funeral home being called Harris, in reference to Julie Harris who played Eleanour/Nell in the original movie. Heck, they even bring back Russ Tamblyn, who played Luke in the original, as Nell’s psychiatrist. Not to mention Nell’s ‘paranormal’ hail stone attack back story incident actually being present in the narrative, albeit given to the mother figure here, Olivia.

So, okay... I’ll start off with listing all the really bad points before finding my way to the positives because, it is a gripping TV show, even if it has nothing to do with the original...

Rather than three strangers brought together by the parapsychologist in the original... Nell, Theo and Luke are all siblings, along with their other brother and sister Steven and Shirley (obviously named after writer Shirley Jackson). They, along with their mother and father, played here by Carla Gugino of Sin City and Henry Thomas, who played the little boy in E.T. - The Extra Terrestrial, all live for a few months in Hill House. So when they eventually return (in the final episode), the events which are manifest are things which have been with them all their lives.

And the film takes a time jump kind of approach... which wouldn’t really be even doable if the director was making a straight adaptation. That is to say, the narrative keeps cross cutting from when the central characters were kids in Hill House to their various lives in the present (like in the original Stephen King novel IT)... where we have Timothy Hutton playing the older version of Henry Thomas’ Hugh Crain... another name which will mean something to fans of the original work but, again, taken totally out of context here. It’s actually not that confusing but the very nature of the structure is enough to tip you off to certain things as, of course, ghost stories have always been trafficking in states of temporal manipulation... ghosts by their very nature are ‘of a time’ different to that when they manifest.

For example, the death of Eleanour at the end of the novel/film is done and dusted in the very first of these ten episodes (half of the content of which doesn’t even take place in the titular residence). It’s not even the same death, instead it harkens back to the character who hung herself from the top of the spiral staircase at the start of the 1963 version. However, once Eleanour dies it’s more than enough to tip off the audience that the ‘bent-neck lady’ as seen by young Eleanour throughout the series, is obviously her older self revisiting backwards in time. I actually got there way before the character died right back near the start of the first episode actually but, yeah, by the end of the episode I think most people would have twigged it and it becomes something of a spoiler. Unless, maybe, Flanagan intended it to be just that, in order to give more meaning to the structure of the show itself... I dunno, could be, I suppose.

Another big element for me which kinda failed is that, unlike the 1963 movie, the show is not actually scary. And when it does go for some fright scenes it uses that technique of making the ambient sound in a room sound more ‘fizzy’ (a technical term, obviously) and it telegraphs (subconsciously for some, perhaps) that something unusual is about to happen. The 1963 one had outstanding sound design and that added much to the scary atmosphere... here it’s just like every other horror movie you see these days and... sometimes that works and sometimes that doesn’t but if you’re going to do a film following in the steps of the classic movie, then maybe you want to do something more jarring or special with the sound?

Also, the big, clever trick of the 1963 version is that you really see very little and your head puts the frights together for you... for this one, the big ‘scare’ moments are anything but subtle and often come across as cheap tricks.

Okay, I’m coming off as a little negative here but only because I love the original versions in their respective media so much. This TV show is actually quite well put together, in spite of some of my earlier criticisms...

For instance, the way the director inserts ghostly figures appearing and disappearing from certain scenes, such as a 360 degree pan which both includes and excludes ghosts depending on which revolution it is on. Or some nice transitions such as... one of those when they definitely got the sound right... a man nailing a frame to a wall in one shot cutting to a guy in Hill House knocking in a chimney as the bangs, slightly exaggerated, spill over between both shots and time zones.

There are also some nice moments scattered throughout where the director uses a very slow, almost imperceptible zoom on a static shot and, clichéd as this has perhaps become in modern horror, he makes this work fairly well and, while the show isn’t actually nearly as scary as it seems to want to be, it’s certainly handled competently as a technique and adds to a voyeuristic, creepy atmosphere which is held throughout the show’s ten episodes.

So yeah... some nice stuff and, because of the decade in which Flanagan is directing this from, Theo’s lesbianism is much more overt than what the Robert Wise directed version got away with when the character was played by Claire Bloom, where it was definitely there in a kind of capitalised highlight of the subtext but, by nature of its time (I suspect), much more suppressed.

Another interesting thing... and I didn’t even realise this until I was about four episodes in... is that the majority of episodes, bar a few of them, are all told through the eyes of one of the main characters. So Luke, Steve, Shirley, Eleanour, Theo, the mother and father are all given their own episode and, of course, this helps with certain ‘reveals’ when an event already witnessed by one character catches up with another character and we can see the whole picture. Such as when Carla Gugino smashes the mirror of a dresser in one scene. I mean, yeah, it’s pretty obvious what caused her character to do this but it’s nice seeing it revisited from her eyes when the time comes. So, while the structure of the way the story is presented may seem ponderous or padded out some of the time, it actually really isn’t... it’s just a complex puzzle the director is presenting to us in an interesting way and, I have to say, it must have been really hard to keep it all in your head in the right order at the writing stage when certain things need to be injected into a specific person’s episode and still be a ‘reveal’ when scenes are revisited. I wonder how much of that stuff was created serendipitously in the editing room.

So yeah, that’s me about done with this particular project. The Haunting Of Hill House TV show is an entertaining enough horror series with much more to be admired than scared of but, absolutely not anything like the original source material and fans of previous versions of this might find this a huge barrier to getting any enjoyment of the show. So if you’ve not read the original novel or seen the 1963 classic, then you will probably get a heck of a lot more out of this than others might. I’ll just leave you with this one thought though... in the 1963 movie, Eleanour, once she has ‘passed on’ and become a ghost, gives us the closing narration... “Hill House has stood for ninety years and will probably stand for ninety more. And we who walk at Hill House, walk alone.” In this version, it’s a very much alive Steven Crain who narrates the famous line reading but, this time around, it’s changed to... “And those who walk there, walk together.” Which is a very different look at the equation and says something, perhaps everything, about this new manifestation of what is, to many, a classic piece of literary and cinematic horror. Still, after all these years, it’s nice to see that walls continue upright, bricks meet neatly and the floors are still, to this day, firm.

San Andreas

Shaken Not Stirred

San Andreas
2015  USA/Australia
Directed by Brad Peyton
UK cinema release print.

I’m sure I probably mentioned this before, last year, in my review of Into The Storm (reviewed here) but I’m not much of a person for disaster movies. I saw some of the John Williams scored classics when I was a kid... such as Earthquake, The Poseidon Adventure and The Towering Inferno (the building of which features in a scene in the film I’m reviewing here now)... and so I am trying to see more of these things because the specific kind of mass destruction which isn’t instigated by hordes of invading alien armies is something I’ve never really paid much attention to in the cinematic landscape.

I was in two minds whether to go and see this movie or not but the reviews saying this was the dumbest thing on screens in a long time kinda sealed the deal for me... I was hoping for, at the very least, an entertaining review. And I have to say that, surprising me in the process, I actually had a better time at the movies with San Andreas than I had the night before when I saw Jurassic World (reviewed here). Sure the science is completely buggered up (as it is with the dinosaur films, obviously) and it’s full of characters doing insanely stupid things (just like that dino movie) but I guess, even though it’s a festival of disaster movie clichés stuck together with some pretty blatantly silly and familiar script points to give it some kind of story arc, I was just expecting a lot less of this film than I was of the higher concept Jurassic Park sequel... so without my expectations raised above a point any higher than hilariously bad, I actually saw... yeah, kind of a mess of a movie, to be sure... but a really fun mess with a nice heart to it plus some nice performances midst the terrible dialogue.

Okay, so the plot involves Dwayne (The Rock) Johnson as Ray, who is handily, considering the subject of this thing, some kind of rescue helicopter pilot who specialises in getting people out of near death situations. This is set up in the first ten minutes of the film with a daring escapade where Ray and his team go to rescue a woman who has been ‘quaked’ in her car so that she is stuck inside said vehicle, perched vertically on the side of a cliff. As Ray’s helicopter views the situation, it’s clear from the constant creaking and slight movements of the car that the down draft from the rotor blades are making the vehicle even more unstable. So Ray does what any good, gung ho rescue guy does in a summer blockbuster kind of movie... he takes the helicopter even closer... because, you know, we need the suspense of the vehicle slipping as his team try and rescue the lady while her predicament becomes less and less stable. Hmmm. Anyway, when one of Ray’s crew gets himself into just as much trouble as the person they are trying to rescue, we get to see Ray become a one man International Rescue and save the day with his bravery and derring do. Hey, it worked for me and I’m really not knocking Dwayne Johnson here... I think The Rock is a solid and watchable personality and he gives a credible performance saying even the cheesiest of lines in some films. He always takes it all very seriously and he always delivers his best. It also helps a lot that he actually looks like he could do some of the ludicrously dangerous things he gets into in the movies. So, yeah, dumb character but... well played and he still has my admiration for rescuing the credibility in some of the roles he finds himself in.

So, anyway, Ray is on his way to see his daughter Blake (played by Alexandra Daddario who is someone with a figure who, trust me, you really need to see in an earthquake movie... for reasons that may become obvious to some of my readers) and his wife Emma, played by the lovely Carla Gugino. Emma is divorcing Ray because of certain emotional communication problems Mr. Rock’s character has. However due to the various upcoming quakes predicted by scientist Lawrence, played by the always amazing Paul Giamatti, mother goes off to see a completely strange and irritating non-character played by... of all people... the lovely Kylie Minogue, while her daughter hangs out with new Dad Number 2, architect Daniel Riddick, played by “the real Reed Richards” himself, Mr. Ioan Gruffudd... the films token human bad guy who, it has to be said, doesn’t have too much time to make the transition from reasonable husband material to less than trustworthy, not very nice person before getting himself killed by having a big, heavy object landing on him.

And that’s one of the main problems with this film actually. The characters are all set up in a way that they seem to just be paying a token service to famous character clichés of movies of the past without actually getting a chance to really inhabit the role before the story function of their character’s plot device is fulfilled and we’re onto the next thing. So when Blake is rescued by two English brothers, one of whom is her new love interest, the film focuses on the daughter and her two new found fiends surviving and trying to get to higher ground in the hopes that her dad will find them... seeing as he’s Mr/ Rescue and all. This is cross cut with the other story arc in which we see Ray rescue his wife from the roof of a crumbling building and then having a bit of a disaster punctuated road movie journey to find their daughter... via helicopter, plane, truck and boat... while at the same time rekindling their own romance due to Ray suddenly feeling he’s able to express his emotions about the daughter they had who died years ago... just in time to use that set up as an ironic, “oh my gosh my other daughter is going to die and I failed to save her too” scene which turns out... in the end... exactly the way you know it’s going to turn out.

So... no surprises here and the stupidity of the people and science in some scenes is, to be fair, quite hard to swallow. However, that being said, there’s also some really nice stuff in here.

For instance, the characters may all be stereotypes but the performers are all doing their best and, although the actors in question aren’t quite able to render their characters anymore 3D than what’s been written on the page for them, they are all doing a really good job in at least keeping them likeable (or unlikable if that is the intention). So there’s that. Added to this, the things these people have to go through in this movie says a lot about the quality of the cast. It seems that a lot of the acting team were doing a fair amount of their own stunts in this one and you do see it on the screen in a lot of the shots. I remember sitting watching an underwater scene near the end of the movie thinking... wow, these people are really putting themselves through this for their craft. I suspect that certain sections of the production of this probably come well under the category of “gruelling film shoot” and so more power to the team of actors in this one... especially The Rock and Alexandra Daddario.

There’s some nice camera work in this movie, too. One brief shot from above a wrecked city looking down through the clouds took my breath away and I wish they’d have just let that one play out for a little longer than the couple of seconds needed for it to fulfil its function as a transitional establishing shot. Also, in regards to the photography, special effects and editing all working together in harmony... job well done. There is a lot of disaster strewn chaos and stuff happening through a lot of the scenes as earthquake after semi-unexpected earthquake assail our heroes but, and this is quite an amazing feat, it’s all choreographed in such a manner that you can see everything that is happening without getting confused and, because of the way it is shot, everything leads into something else in a logical fashion without causing you to lose your bearings amid all the madness. So, really, congratulations to all involved in this production.

One last thing... Andrew Lockington’s score for this one deserves a special mention. Now, I didn’t get to hear a heck of a lot of it, for sure, because the sound effects and design are pretty overpowering (which is one of the reasons why I’ve ordered a copy of the CD... so I can explore it way from the film) but there was definitely something interesting going on here and there were a couple of moments where the sound design and musical score kinda met each other, which really stood out for me. There’s a whole lot of rumbling, crashing and so on in this film’s audio track and, one of the key things they seem to be doing here is to put a lot of creaking in to indicate structural damage which is about to kick off again... as a way of ramping up tension. However, there were certain times in the movie where things were a little bit quieter... and this is where Lockington uses big drumrolls which kind of sound like a musical way of indicating that same instability. There were points where I couldn’t tell where the rumbling was starting and ending as the score took over. In fact, I began to get uneasy when I heard the drum rolls in case it meant something else was going to come crashing down on the main protagonists any moment. So, again, job well done on that and I’m looking forward to hearing the score unencumbered by the movie.

And that’s about it for San Andreas. The dialogue is lousy and there’s a visual moment right at the end of the movie, when the dust has settled, so to speak, which is really unbearably cheesy and it involves the American flag. It’s a terrible, terrible, over the top moment but, I guess that’s in keeping with the nature of the film and so I can kind of forgive it. Now, I’m aware that this film shares a lot of things which I was less than happy about in the new Jurassic World movie but, I’ll say it again here... I wasn’t expecting anything too high concept on this one so I really didn’t stumble out of this one disappointed. It may not be the best disaster movie around but it certainly had some nice things about it that other, more accepted movies of this nature could have done with and, at the end of the day, what with all the clichés attacking the audience left, right and centre, it had its heart in the right place. Not exactly the best movie your going to see here but if you like to see big structures toppling and lots of running about... well, you could spend your money on a lot worse at the cinema right now.