Like all disaster films, “Earthquake” opens by giving us glimpses into the lives of our main players. In Los Angeles, Stewart Graff is a structural engineer of some sort who is going through a mid-life crisis; he reminisces of his days playing football and cheats on his grating wife with perky, young widow Denise. LAPD Sgt. Lou Slade is a no-bull police officer who works tirelessly to help the underdog and get the baddie, no matter what the police bureaucracy throws his way. There’s also Miles Quade (an Evel Knievel-like stuntman), Jody Joad (a National Guard leader with dark side), and a Drunk (who always finds himself, unbothered, in the thick of it). We spend a whopping 52 minutes with all of these characters and their personal dramas, with only a few foreshocks to show for it. Then, the big one hits. 9.9 on the Richter Scale. The shaking lasts a whole 8 minutes and Los Angeles comes out in ruins. For the next 63 minutes, we watch our characters find the capacity for leadership, band together, stand up for what’s right, and in some instances, make the ultimate sacrifice. If only there was a point to all of this caricatured drama.
After watching “The Poseidon Adventure” last year, everything was pointing to watching “The Towering Inferno” next—but I chose to detour to “Earthquake” because (you guessed it, if you know me) I was curious about it after riding the Universal Studios Tour tram experience. And I really wish I hadn’t as I didn’t care for this film. I mean, I expect the film to follow the formula and have half-baked characters. I personally love that about disaster films. But this one felt like a bit of a slog because it rarely felt like there were stakes.
In “The Poseidon Adventure”, or “Volcano”, or “Independence Day”, there’s a bunch of destruction and whatnot, but the characters are racing against the clock to accomplish something, so you root for them. This film felt like a series of character and disaster vignettes stitched together with no high-stakes goal other than “help people” we don’t have much connection to. It felt so hollow that when a star character makes a great sacrifice, his action sort of doesn’t make sense in the context of what we’ve been given. It sounds like the plot was gutted after some test screenings, but it’s a weird problem for a Mario Puzo script (this film is a weird miss between some of the greatest films of all time, “The Godfather” I-and-II and “Superman”).
The disaster shots were fun (and a highlight of contemporary reviews), but looked weak in HD (where I could actually see the special effects lever that rotated to knock pieces of a wall out). And it’s always fun seeing Charlton Heston chew the scenery (rigged to fall apart). But for me, I found the premise to be too shaky. #illseemyselfout