San Andreas (2015)
San Andreas is a 2015 American disaster film directed by Brad Peyton and written by Carlton Cuse, with Andre Fabrizio and Jeremy Passmore receiving story credit. The film stars Dwayne Johnson, Carla Gugino, Alexandra Daddario, Ioan Gruffudd, Archie Panjabi, and Paul Giamatti. Its plot centers on an earthquake caused by the San Andreas Fault devastating Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area. Principal photography of the film started on April 22, 2014, in Queensland, Australia and wrapped up on July 28 in San Francisco. The film was released worldwide in 2D and 3D on May 29, 2015, received mixed reviews from critics, praising the visual effects and Johnson and Gugino’s performances but criticizing the plot and characters. It grossed $474 million worldwide.
Plot.
Caltech seismologist Dr. Lawrence Hayes and his colleague Dr. Kim Park are at Hoover Dam testing a new earthquake prediction model when a nearby and previously unknown fault ruptures, triggering a 7.1 magnitude earthquake that collapses the dam; Park sacrifices himself to save a young girl. Hayes discovers that the entire San Andreas Fault is shifting and will soon cause a series of major earthquakes, potentially destroying cities along the fault line. He begins racing to warn the population of California along with his students Alexi and Phoebe and reporter Serena Johnson. When a 9.1 magnitude earthquake devastates Los Angeles and San Francisco, Ray Gaines, a Los Angeles Fire Department helicopter-rescue pilot going through a divorce from his wife, Emma, finds himself rescuing her from a skyscraper in Los Angeles. Meanwhile, their daughter, Blake, has been visiting San Francisco
with Emma’s new boyfriend, Daniel, when an earthquake strikes the city. Rubble from the collapsing parking garage pins her in Daniel’s car. Panicking, Daniel leaves Blake in an act of cowardice. Ben Taylor, a British engineer seeking employment at Daniel’s firm, and his younger brother Ollie rescue Blake and they reach Chinatown, successfully calling her parents for help.
Ray and Emma attempt to reach San Francisco in Ray’s helicopter until it suffers a gearbox failure, forcing them to make an emergency landing at a shopping mall in Bakersfield. Amid the chaos of looting, Ray steals a truck to continue the journey. The pair encounter a couple broken down on the side of the road, shortly before the San Andreas Fault, which has torn a large fissure through the highway and extends for the perceivable length of the fault in either direction. Ray and Emma exchange the truck for an airplane the couple owns.
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As Blake, Ben, and Ollie attempt to reach Nob Hill to signal the pair after finding their previous meeting point at Coit Tower engulfed in flames, Ray and Emma are forced to parachute into AT&T Park just before a 9.6 magnitude quake hits, becoming the largest recorded earthquake in history.
As the quake subsides, having destroyed much of the city, Ray and Emma commandeer a boat to reach the group, only to realize a tsunami is approaching San Francisco Bay. Alongside a handful of other survivors in small boats, the two manage to cross the wave before it crests, barely avoiding a container ship caught up in the wave. The ship bisects the Golden Gate Bridge’s center span in half, killing everyone on the bridge, including Daniel, who is crushed to death by a falling shipping container. The tsunami proceeds to strike the ruined city, capsizing a cruise ship in the process, and killing thousands more, rendering it uninhabitable.
Blake, Ben, and Ollie enter the Gate, a building whose construction Daniel had been overseeing, but are still caught by the wave. As the building begins to collapse, trapping Blake underwater, Ray dives in, rescues her, and begins performing CPR. Emma crashes the boat through a window and drives the five of them out of the collapsing building as Ray resuscitates Blake.
The survivors regroup at a relief camp on the other side of the bay, where the reconciled Ray and Emma talk about their future. On the remains of the Golden Gate Bridge, an American flag unfolds, giving hope that the city will recover and rebuild, as rescue vehicles descend on the radically altered landscape of the San Francisco Bay Area, which has now extended from San Jose to Santa Cruz, turning the San Francisco Peninsula into an island.
Development.
On December 1, 2011, it was announced that New Line Cinema was developing an earthquake disaster film, San Andreas: 3D, from a script by Jeremy Passmore and Andre Fabrizio; Allan Loeb polished the script. On June 5, 2012, the studio set Brad Peyton to direct the film. On July 18, 2012, New Line tapped Carlton Cuse to re-write the script for the earthquake disaster film. On July 18, 2013, The Conjuring writers Carey Hayes and Chad Hayes were tapped by the studio to re-write the film again. The film was also produced by New Line and Village Roadshow Pictures, along with Flynn Picture Company and Australian limited Village Roadshow.
Casting.
On October 14, 2013, Dwayne Johnson closed a deal to star in the film, playing the role of a helicopter pilot searching for his daughter after an earthquake. On February 4, 2014, Alexandra Daddario joined the cast. On March 12, 2014, Carla Gugino joined the cast, reuniting with Dwayne Johnson, with whom she starred in Race to Witch Mountain and Faster. On March 14, 2014, Game of Thrones actor Art Parkinson joined the film’s cast. On April 1, 2014, Archie Panjabi joined the earthquake film. On April 5, 2014, Todd Williams also joined the film, to play Marcus Crowlings, an old Army friend of Johnson’s character. On April 15, 2014, Colton Haynes was added to the cast of the film. On April 29, Ioan Gruffudd joined the cast of the film. Gruffudd played Daniel Reddick, a wealthy real estate developer who is dating Johnson’s character’s estranged wife. On May 28, Will Yun Lee joined the cast to play Dr. Kim Park, the co-director of the Caltech Seismology Lab in the film. On June 11, Australian singer and actress Kylie Minogue joined the film to play Gruffudd’s sister.
Filming.
On December 17, 2013, Variety reported that the film would be shot at Village Roadshow Studios in Gold Coast, Queensland, Australia. The production was set to start in April 2014 in Queensland, with locations including Ipswich and Brisbane. On March 20, 2014, it was announced that Gods of Egypt had started production in Australia, and San Andreas was set to begin soon after. On April 16, 2014, Johnson tweeted photos from the training for the film. Filming began on April 22, 2014, in Australia and was also shot in the Los Angeles area, Bakersfield, and San Francisco. On May 12, shooting took place in the Lockyer Valley. On May 10–11, shooting was taking place in Los Angeles and then production went back to Australia to complete the rest of shooting. On May 17, second unit was filming scenes in Bakersfield where a helicopter was spotted, while Johnson was busy in Gold Coast. On June 22, the crew was spotted filming disaster scenes on Elizabeth Street in Brisbane.RELATED:
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The film’s second-unit started shooting on July 8, in San Francisco, while the first unit began shooting on July 21, wrapping up on July 27. On July 15–16, first unit was filming in Fisherman’s Wharf, while a second unit was also filming in Embarcadero on July 16. On July 21, the filming was taking place at AT&T Park, where the crew shot a scene during a San Francisco Giants game. On July 22, they filmed an earthquake with fake victims and fake garbage at Hyde and Lombard streets in Russian Hill. On July 23, crews were filming disaster scenes in The Armory. On July 26, they filmed some scenes near the Fairmont Hotel, with the last day of filming spent shooting on the California Street in Financial District, wrapping up filming on July 27, 2014.
Visual effects, Release, Home Media.
The visual effects are provided by Hydraulx, Cinesite and Image Engine and Supervised by Greg and Colin Strause, Holger Voss and Martyn Culpitt with help from Scanline VFX and Method Studios. On December 5, 2013, Warner Bros. set the film for a June 5, 2015, release, in 2D and 3D. On October 21, 2014, Warner Bros. moved up the film’s original release date from June 5, 2015, then to May 29, 2015. It was the company’s first film to be released in Dolby Cinema. San Andreas was released on Digital HD and Blu-ray/DVD on October 13, 2015. Upon its first week of release on home media in the U.S., the film topped the Nielsen VideoScan First Alert chart, which tracks overall disc sales, and debuted at number 2 at the Blu-ray Disc sales chart with 40% of unit sales coming from Blu-ray, a surprisingly low ratio given the film’s over-the-top special effects. It was blocked by the Diamond Edition Blu-ray Disc edition of the 1992 Disney animated classic Aladdin. As of 2016, it is available in 4K UHD Blu-ray.
Box office.
San Andreas grossed $155.2 million in North America and $318.8 million in other territories for a worldwide total of $474 million. It became the highest-grossing Warner Bros. film of 2015, and the fourteenth highest-grossing film worldwide overall. Deadline Hollywood calculated the net profit of the film to be $88.07 million, when factoring together all expenses and revenues for the film. Since its release, the film remains the biggest-grossing live-action Hollywood original film of the past six and a half years as of January 2022
Critical response.
On Rotten Tomatoes, a review aggregator, the film has an approval rating of 48% based on 252 reviews and an average rating of 5.2/10. The website’s critical consensus reads, “San Andreas has a great cast and outstanding special effects, but amidst all the senses-shattering destruction, the movie’s characters and plot prove less than structurally sound.” On Metacritic, the film has a score of 43 out of 100 based on 42 critics, indicating “mixed or average reviews”. Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of “A–” on an A+ to F scale. IGN awarded it a score of 7.5 out of 10, saying, “There are some cracks in the foundation, but San Andreas is solid popcorn fare thanks to sharp visuals and The Rock.” Writing in Variety, Andrew Barker wrote, “Of the many charges that can be levied against Brad Peyton’s San Andreas, false advertising is not one of them.
The disaster pic promises nothing more than the complete CGI destruction of California as foregrounded by Dwayne Johnson’s jackfruit-sized biceps, and it delivers exactly that”. Andrew O’Hehir wrote in Salon, “Considered as pure spectacle, San Andreas is gripping and effective, as well as a somewhat interesting form of counter-narrative: A vision of near-term apocalypse that has nothing to do with climate change, monsters or alien invaders”. Entertainment Weekly’s critic Chris Nashawaty wrote, “As patently preposterous, scientifically dubious, and unapologetically corny as director Brad Peyton’s orgy of CGI devastation is, its popcorn prophecy of the inevitable is a blast of giddy, disposable fun”. Mick LaSalle wrote in The San Francisco Chronicle, “Some movies are easy to mock, but hard to resist. This is one of them”