San Andreas (2015) is a natural-disaster thriller about a search-and-rescue pilot who saves his daughter and reconciles with his ex-wife amid the chaos of the world's most destructive earthquake as it strikes the West Coast of the United States. Directed by Brad Peyton, the film stars Dwayne Johnson, Carla Gugino, and Alexandra Daddario.
Ray Gaines, a Los Angeles Fire Department rescue helicopter pilot and ex-military service member, prepares to drive his daughter Blake to college in Washington. However, he must cancel the plan to assist in rescue operations after an earthquake strikes Nevada. Blake goes with her mother's new boyfriend, Daniel, a wealthy building developer, stopping first in San Francisco so he can attend a meeting. When a 9.1 magnitude earthquake strikes California, Ray rescues his ex-wife, Emma, from the top of a collapsing building. When they learn Blake is trapped in a carpark after Daniel abandoned her, Ray and Emma fly north to find their daughter. Blake, meanwhile, is freed from under a concrete beam with the help of Ben and Ollie, an English man and his little brother. On their way north, Ray and Emma crash-land Ray's helicopter, steal a truck, fly a small plane, and drive a boat. Simultaneously, they talk through their grief over their other daughter's drowning death, reconciling their marriage. Blake, meanwhile, leads Ben and Ollie through San Francisco as it is rocked by more tremors and a tsunami that kills Daniel. The film ends with the five survivors brought closer by their experience as they approach the major task of rebuilding.
A fictional and likely exaggerated exploration of an anticipated mega-thrust earthquake known as "The Big One," San Andreas uses CGI to depict extreme seismic activity along the San Andreas Fault, a tectonic boundary between the Pacific Plate and North American Plate. While the film shows the devastation of a magnitude 9.6 earthquake, the San Andreas Fault's most destructive rupture was the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, an estimated 7.8 magnitude earthquake that resulted in at least three thousand deaths.
