Peyton: San Andreas (2015)

There’s a special place in the American imaginary for apocalyptic visions of California – and Los Angeles in particular – that’s only become more apparent with the glut of climate change disaster films released over the last decade. None, of them, however, have envisaged such total destruction as San Andreas, which promises nothing less than a quake big enough to destroy San Francisco, Los Angeles and most of California – the destruction of California as a planetary event - setting up an entirely new and unrecognisable landscape in their place. Anchoring it all is The Rock as Raymond “Ray” Gaines, a helicopter-rescue pilot who finds himself cut adrift from his family on the day the quake strikes, although “anchor” is perhaps not quite the right word, since Ray ends up spending most of the day in the air, trawling above San Francisco, and then the Napa Valley, trying to hunt down his wife and daughter. In some ways, that’s a logical place to position us for this kind of film, the best vantage point for a panoramic sprawl of quakes, aftershocks, tidal waves and, of course, the faultline itself, zizagging down the Californian landscape like some giant work of land art. It’s curious, then, that the film makes so little effort to go beyond or even rework the digital destruction of earlier action films, offering us such a wealth of CGI information that it feels as if the spectacle is over before it’s really begun. If anything, the most spectacular scenes actually occur at ground level, or at least in skyscrapers, with director Brad Peyton really capturing the peculiar terror of being trapped in an earthquake-resistant skyscraper during an actual earthquake, as it trembles and rocks to the limits of what it can withstand. That said, comparatively little of the action takes place on the ground, or feels grounded in any permanent way, such that the horror of the quake – established, early on, in a breathtaking scene at the Hoover Dam – hovers somewhere between ground and aerial perspectives, not really contained by either. At times, undoubtedly, that slackens the momentum and disperses any real sense of tension, but it also makes it feel as if airspace itself has absorbed something of the atmosphere and ambience of the quake, despite the fact that like being aloft seems like the only way to really escape it. For all that The Rock seems safest and most mobile in the air, he's also forced to abandon every helicopter he pilots, creating a looming awareness that, in a world without any kind of stable groundspace to touch down or refuel, there’s only one real outcome. And it’s that sense of the sky as an apocalyptic canvas that distinguishes the film – a new precarity and terror to shared airspace that feels as indebted to the recent string of airline disasters as to the more conventional apocalyptic iconography unfolding below, a fear of flying that feels even more subconscious and collective than the fear of climate change, as you gradually, subliminally realise that the film has nowhere left to land.