I recently used a long flight to catch up on my bad movie viewing and so settled back to daydream through the summer blockbuster San Andreas. I admit to having been initially interested in the movie, having been, as a child, very keen on the 1975 film Earthquake, complete with Surround Sound. And while there were certain similarities between San Andreas and Earthquake – and every other disaster movie ever made, with its vapid focus on collapsing things, screaming people and heroes impossibly triumphing through it all – this film is almost solely derived from images of our mass-media natural disaster consciousness, The 911 Attacks in New York and Thailand’s 2004 Tsunami most of all. These traumatically ingrained images have been transformed into moments of cartoonish fun, which years ago would have been blasphemous and now are just a vehicle to profits. Kind of like the manner in which we cope with global warming – something to spin and from which to derive short-term profit.
Sad but true. So I don’t watch them at all, 🙂
They blowed up Los Angeles real good.