It was a nice disaster movie, but not what I hoped. There were the great special effects I was expecting to see, but the story was disappointing. I’m not talking about the science of it, I’m no expert and anyway disasters movies are sci-fi yes, but always more fi than sci. Knowing that there was Dwayne Johnson in it, I thought he’d be the lead of a big rescue operation, working alongside the usual experts, but unfortunately there was the usual lame romance in it. I mean, usually I’m all for depth in characters and all that stuff, but in this case, in disaster movies, who really wants the story of their lives? Disaster movies should only focus on the present.
So, Dwayne is Ray, who has one daughter and a wife about to become ex-wife. They split up because he stopped communicating with her after they lost their other daughter… now she’s about to move in with her new boyfriend, and even if only a few minutes have passed we know everything already: he’ll save wife and daughter and the family will be together again… a no brainer really :-/ a useless subplot that ruined everything, all he did was flying to rescue the wife, then running around in search of their daughter :-/
More in details: the beginning already left me like :-/ a girl is driving and she looks everywhere but at the road (searches the car for a bottle of water, reads a text..) and yet no accident, but then the earth moves and her car falls into a big canyon and Ray comes in a helicopter with two other guys to save her. He takes the helicopter inside the canyon ( really?? :-/ come on! ) and a guy goes to save her but not just yet, lets first fix the car! :-/ …
The guy gets trapped under the car so Ray has to go down himself, he takes the girl, lets the car crash down and they are all safe… is this seriously the right way to do it? Couldn’t the guy just take hold of the girl and take her to safety? What was he doing with the car? He risked taking down the helicopter with the weight of it… :-/
Anyway, we meet two seismologists, Dr Hayes (Paul Giamatti) and Dr Kim (Will Yun Lee), who have a very small role, much smaller than they should have had. Kim is the real hero of the movie, because at the first earthquake, while running towards safety, he stops to help a little girl, taking her up in his arms and therefore running much more slowly (couldn’t he take her hand and have her run?? I guess not, she was probably in one of those panic state where they totally freeze :-/ ); anyway, there was the exact scene I was expecting to see: earth opens, he falls, but throws the kid at Hayes to save her, than yells No! to him when he wants to go help him, saving him as well in a way. That was the best and most painful scene of the whole movie. Yep.
Then we have a little background story on Ray and his family, and as soon as you learn that Emma (Carla Gugino) is moving in with Daniel (Ioan Gruffudd) you’re as sure as if you wrote it yourself that he’ll turn up to be an asshole so that she’ll go back to Ray :-/
Daniel takes Blake (Alexandra Daddario, the daughter) to San Francisco, and he seems nice enough, but when she gets trapped in the car and he can’t take her out, he leaves her to go and find help, but then things are so bad that he looks in shock and leaves. Blake gets saved by two guys she just briefly met, Ben (Hugo Johnstone-Burt) and his younger brother Ollie. From this moment on, Blake will travel with the two of them, looking for a safe, high spot where her father will come get her, and there were some annoying scenes like: since she has a father who is a firefighter in Los Angeles, she knows everything she has to do in the event of a huge earthquake ( … :- / … ), so they break into a phone store to find an old rotary phone with a land line that will work even if cell phones are dead, so she can call her dad, then she takes a bag of tools from a bus… it sounded so farfetched, she was very very pretty yes, but also such a boring and unreal character :-/ and Ben and Ollie just tag along..
In the meantime, San Francisco is falling down completely, not just the bridges but all the buildings, and the big ships, and then everything gets covered with water so that instead of a car the parents use a rubber boat..
First Ray saves his wife (but he was going to work, to help with the rescue missions, then she called and he just went to save just her…) and it seems like everything is ok for them, even if down there (they are on a helicopter) people are dying under collapsing buildings. Now that Ray and Emma are together, Blake calls to say that Daniel left her, and Emma leaves him a message on the answering machine like: if you’re not dead yet I’ll kill you… and they laugh at each other… :-//
Since Daniel could be thought simply as a man acting in shock, but not a bad one, they give us another scene with him taking a man away from his safe spot by force, so that Daniel saves himself while the poor man gets killed… so that the audience won’t be sad to see him die in a later scene :-/
Of course there are the usual scenes of dumb people that take the opportunity of a massive disaster to steal televisions (… :-/ and yet there are probably people like that :-/ and they are probably much more than the people like Kim, no doubt :-/ what a wonderful world huh? :-/ )
Even if all around buildings are falling down, Blake keeps saying that they need to find a tall one and go higher so that her dad will find her, and leads the two guys towards a tower where he’ll come and get her. When they can’t reach the tower, she sets off for another tall building, the opposite way, and yet dad finds her… :-/ The flood is incredible, the building falls almost entirely under water, she gets trapped and drowns, they get her on to the rubber boat and Ray tries to revive her but she doesn’t respond, until he says she won’t lose her too and tries again (because he had stopped, thinking her dead already) and now she wakes up right away, coughing water… obviously, as if anyone could believe for a split second that she could die! I know this kind of movies, where everyone can die but if the hero saves the one person he’s looking for than it’s a happy ending :-/
Then, it all ends, and the tv news (working just fine it would seem), only talk about the survivors, not a word about who or how many died: a positive ending for a positive America (yeah right) with the last line from Ray saying that now, they’ll rebuild it… :-/
I’ve seen it, and once is honestly more than enough.
Nessun commento:
Posta un commento