The Fault Near Our Stars: SAN ANDREAS

Shamelessly formulaic, San Andreas is a familiar disaster movie. It wants us to gawk as California is hit by the Biggest Earthquake Ever Recorded, but only care if one man can save his wife and daughter. Two major cities are flattened and drowned, but at least we can hope our movie’s stars are okay. The final scene includes a wide shot taking in a big sweep of the film’s devastation, then a close up of TV news with a chyron reading: “Thousands Saved.” Isn’t that the disaster movie way? It’s not the presumably millions of unknown victims who have been crushed by the upheaval we should care about. It’s the ones who’ve made it through. “We’ll rebuild,” one man says, before we see a tattered American flag billowing in the breeze off a crumpled landmark.

But we’re not supposed to be thinking about any broader consequences in the moment. It’s a non-stop button-pushing effects reel, disaster imagery conjured by talented animators, cascading catastrophes made to slam around our main characters with frightening intensity, and ripple across metropolises’ skylines with eerie fluidity. Debris clouds the sky as pedestrians run, fires erupt, asphalt ruptures, skyscrapers sway, and the ground roils like a wave. It’s all very impressively visualized, scary at first, then numbing as it goes on. After helming a surprisingly charming kids’ B-movie adventure (Journey 2 The Mysterious Island), director Brad Peyton seems ready to grab the disaster movie mantle in the tradition of Irwin Allen and Roland Emmerich. He shares with them a sort of industrial strength spectacle, even if he can’t quite match their sense of fun. Mayhem taken to the max, it is eye-boggling noise, good for a simple distraction.

The movie is stocked with the usual types of its genre, like an anxious scientist (Paul Giamatti) and his colleague (Will Yun Lee) who warn that this is “the big one,” and a TV reporter (Archie Panjabi) who provides access to broadcasting equipment to spread the warning. They’re minor figures in the plot. Unlike ensemble spectacles with cross-sections of reactions to a cataclysmic event, this movie narrows in on one family as they try to survive and reunite once the earth starts quaking. Our lead (Dwayne Johnson) pilots rescue helicopters. His twenty-something daughter (Alexandra Daddario) is away at college, while his wife (Carla Gugino) has served divorce papers and is moving in with her new man (Ioan Gruffudd). Then the San Andreas Fault cracks open, unleashing a swarm of earthquakes, blowing apart tepid little dramas and allowing a natural disaster to serve as matchmaker, couples’ therapist, and a test of character.

Johnson is mid-air when the quake hits, so he immediately points his helicopter towards the danger and heads off to save his family. Gugino is on the top of a teetering high-rise, while Daddario is helping two British tourists, relatively helpless brothers (Hugo Johnstone-Burt and Art Parkinson). The small cast keeps the immediate emotional stakes small, but also a tad callous. Should a rescue pilot really be absconding with government property to save his own family first? Still, it’s insanely comfortable to want Johnson to succeed. He’s a likeable, rock solid presence in the middle of chaos. With a strong determination and relaxed take-charge expression, it’s easy to believe him when he looks out across a flattened San Francisco and says of his missing daughter, “she’ll be alright.” If you can block out the scope of the tragedy around this family, it’s easy to enjoy it as the roller coaster it was intended to be.

Carlton Cuse’s screenplay is essentially a Mad Libs construction built out of story elements that wouldn’t have been out of place back when Charlton Heston confronted Earthquake in Sensurround. There are some howlingly terrible lines and preposterous coincidences. But it’s all wrapped in effectively over-the-top, hectic and tense, fine empty spectacle. Every rescue is last minute. Helicopters swing between collapsing skyscrapers, characters run up and down crumbling stairwells in unbroken takes, and boats push over the top of cresting tsunamis dodging flailing freighters. Rian Johnson’s cinematographer Steve Yedlin shoots beautiful broad daylight, the better to see absurdly detailed flotsam and jetsam spraying out from crumbling, colliding, and collapsing bits of everything. Every character is shot for picturesque peril, sent through the wringer as anonymous victims perish all around them. Of course it’s a relief when characters tearfully reunite after surviving an onslaught of terrifying events. But the movie’s only alive when they’re in peril.

Because the cast is so likable it’s almost excusable they’re hardly characters. In fact, the movie’s at it’s worst when it pauses mid-quake for light quips or tearful moments of interpersonal drama. No, this is a motion picture, emphasis on motion. The only emotion is survival. Performers are scrubbed clean and only lightly damaged, the better to use as bodies in motion, not to ogle (even Daddario’s brief bikini scene is tasteful), but to careen through carnage. San Andreas says being smart enough about what to do in an emergency will save you, while showing characters escaping certain death through CGI luck. It provides preparedness URLs in the end credits, after we’ve sat through two hours of millions wiped out while confident characters guide a few dozen to safety. At one point our hero saves a crowd of people by yelling, “Get near something steady!” while a skyscraper vomits glass and a stadium heaves slightly off its foundation. What’s steady? In a crisis, I’d follow The Rock. It works out well enough this time.

What Goes Around Comes Around: LOOPER

Time travel is tricky for both characters and filmmakers, a gambit filled with potential plot holes, paradoxes and butterfly effects well known to anyone even glancingly familiar with this sci-fi subgenre. These kinds of movies generally litter their runtime with unanswerable questions. With Looper, writer-director Rian Johnson (he of the great high school noir film Brick) has given the time travel picture a jolt of smart intensity, embracing the concept by making unanswerable philosophical time travel questions into an advantage. It joins the classics of the subgenre (from Chris Marker’s La Jetée to Robert Zemeckis’s Back to the Future, from Shane Carruth’s Primer to James Cameron’s Terminator series) as a film that, rather than getting overwhelmed by a need to explain and explain, simply uses its time travel rules, at once utterly simple and dizzyingly complex, in the service of a great story.

Johnson knows that great science fiction starts not just with world-building or dazzling effects, although Looper does both very well, but with ground-level characters, recognizable personalities who happen to find themselves in fantastical scenarios. Take for instance the man who will be both protagonist and antagonist in this film, sometimes even at the same time. His name is Joe. He kills people for a living. More accurately, he kills people from the future. The year is 2044 and although time travel has yet to be invented, it will be soon enough. In 2074, time travel is illegal and thus only used by a crime syndicate for the sole purpose of disposing bodies. That’s where Joe and his co-workers come in.

Known as Loopers, their job is to take their guns out to the middle of nowhere, kill the future people, and collect a paycheck until the time comes that their future employers decide to “close the loop,” forcing them into retirement by killing their future selves. It’s a complicated conceit that plays out with stunning simplicity, effortlessly explained and immediately the stuff of high stakes when the time comes for Joe to close his loop. He finds himself caught off guard by his older self, who fights back and escapes. Old Joe (Bruce Willis) is now on the run from his younger self (Joseph Gordon-Levitt, with makeup and prosthetics that convincingly creates an approximation of young Willis) and both are forced to flee their fellow Loopers (Jeff Daniels, Garret Dillahunt, and Noah Segan among them) who are determined to set the future straight by closing up this temporal loose end.

By the time this happens, the world of the film feels sturdy, convincing. High-tech embellishments create a world that feels almost like our own, close enough to recognize, advanced enough to feel foreign. The characters are all world-weary men, doing a messy job with professionalism. This new wrinkle in their day-to-day grind of violence by day and hard partying by night is treated with a tired tension, an urgency that is both intense and unsurprising. Something like this was bound to happen. Indeed, we’ve seen that it has at least once, but that time clean up was relatively easy. Both Joes are hard to catch. The older Joe roams the cityscape – Johnson imagines a future with both hoverbikes and pervasive homelessness – on a mission to change his fate. The younger Joe hides out with a tough farm woman (Emily Blunt) and her little boy (the adorable Pierce Gagnon).

At first, I thought I had the film pinned down as simply a fantastic man-on-the-run picture with sci-fi influences, a sort of doubled, time-shifting version of The Fugitive. But suddenly, the movie slips away and grows deeper, darker, sadder, and more beautiful. To even suggest the shape the story takes from here would be a disservice to you, reader. This is most definitely a film that plays even better with a joyful sense of discovery. Let me just say that the film finds surprising, upsetting, exciting, and rather moving ways to circle its main thematic concerns about what makes a person become the person they will ultimately be. This is a thriller with plenty of gunplay, chase scenes, cold-blooded murder (most shockingly of total innocents), and seamless special effects, but Johnson treats these developments with a weight and seriousness.  The performances are completely convincing and, through the characters and the style, which is flashy and distinct without once overwhelming the driving story, the film feels grounded in a way that many films of its ilk don’t. Looper contains notes of deep darkness that are treated without sensationalism. Here, violence hurts. Injuries have consequences. Scars linger.

This film thrillingly skirts past all the usual pitfalls and creates an exciting and cohesive film that is violent and cynical, but romantic and humanistic as well. Johnson embraces these apparent contradictions to follow loops of plot to the kind of climax that feels at once startling and wholly inevitable. Looking back on its entirety, it’s easy to see how fully and neatly Johnson has led us to this point. This ingeniously structured movie, neat and tidy by the end, is skillfully complex, a movie that operates from a set of rules that seem fully thought through, inhabiting a world rather than using it as narratively convenient. With Steve Yedlin’s warm yet precise cinematography of great pictorial beauty, from the steel-and-concrete, graffiti-covered streets of downtown to the dusty fields of farmland, recalling the casual gracefulness in the down-to-earth sci-fi of early Spielberg, it’s a story of imagination and emotion set against a detailed futuristic environment that feels detailed in compelling ways that nonetheless remain in the background with minimal fuss. This is a world, not merely a stage.

And on this stage, inner conflict exploded outwards. The central drama of the film is nothing less than a man fighting to become a better man by changing his circumstances, an older man literally drawn into combat with his younger self. There’s a tense, funny scene between the two versions in a diner that brings new meaning to the phrase “talking to yourself.” Whether one realizes it or not, each second takes a person away from the person one is now and towards the person one will become. For Joe, time travel has brought this process into sharp focus. Both versions have a chance to regard the entirety of his life to date and decide how best to get out of this situation with their life (and maybe even the world) better off. But is this even possible with outside forces and circumstances crushing in on them (him)?

Johnson patiently complicates the scenario, sketching details of plot with camera moves that silently reveal new information and shot compositions that cement tension and power dynamics. He off-handedly introduces concepts that will come roaring back into focus later. Here is a movie about fate that feels inevitable but vibrant, a movie about choices that feels carefully designed. Like all the best time travel movies, when it ended I felt the pleasant confusion that made me want to see it again, to diagram the timelines and figure out what, in the end, remains real and what has been cancelled out. Best of all, I felt confident that I very well could do just that. Looper is a film so emotionally engaged and technologically accomplished, so confident in the rules of its universe, that there’s a feeling its implications resonate far beyond any given frame, beyond the focus of this particular story. Johnson has created the rare film that seems to expand.