Published
San Andreas arrived in the early summer of 2015 with a premise old enough to have survived two previous Hollywood earthquake cycles, and the original review of record called it what it was: another cliché disaster film, and still enjoyable. That double verdict held up. What has lasted longer than the argument, though, is the cast — because the queries that still reach this page are mostly about the people in it.
The plot, in one paragraph
Caltech seismologist Lawrence Hayes (Paul Giamatti) proves earthquakes can be predicted, minutes before the Hoover Dam collapses on his colleague. The San Andreas Fault then ruptures in sequence — Los Angeles first, San Francisco worse, and the film splits into two journeys: LAFD rescue pilot Ray Gaines (Dwayne Johnson) and his almost-ex-wife Emma (Carla Gugino) crossing the state by helicopter, plane and boat to reach their daughter; and that daughter, Blake (Alexandra Daddario), navigating the ruins of San Francisco with two British brothers she met in a lobby an hour earlier. A magnitude 9.6, a tsunami over the Golden Gate, one rooftop rescue at the buzzer.
The family at the centre
The Gaines family triangle is the film’s actual subject; the earthquake is scheduling. Johnson does the flying, but the screenplay quietly hands the competence to the women — Gugino’s Emma survives a collapsing high-rise on her own judgment, and Daddario’s Blake runs her third of the film as its second lead, scavenging phones, reading evacuation maps and keeping two tourists alive. Daddario, then best known for the Percy Jackson films and the first season of True Detective, got the career bump the film had to give: “alexandra daddario san andreas” remains one of the searches that finds this page a decade later.
The brothers everyone asks about
The two Britons with Blake are Ben Taylor, an earnest young engineer played by Hugo Johnstone-Burt, and his kid brother Ollie, played by Art Parkinson, and Parkinson is, by search volume, the person this page is most asked about. He was thirteen when the film shot, already familiar as Rickon Stark from Game of Thrones, and San Andreas placed him between that role and the one critics remember him for: the title voice of Kubo and the Two Strings a year later. Ollie gives the film its tour-guide-book running gag and most of its unforced charm, which is not nothing in a movie otherwise made of falling concrete.
What the review of record said
Critics landed close to where that original review had started: the effects enormous, the script assembled from the disaster-movie parts bin, Johnson the reason it works anyway. Reviews at the time repeatedly singled out the same two things, the star’s credibility doing improbable rescues, and the film’s straight face while a strike-slip fault produces a Pacific tsunami that real seismology says it cannot. Audiences disagreed with nobody and went anyway: it opened at number one and became one of the year’s bigger live-action hits, large enough that New Line announced sequel plans almost immediately. That sequel has never been made, a fate this site keeps a whole ledger of.
The complete billed cast, from Johnson down to the supporting players, is in the table below. Two of the names carry fuller files here: Carla Gugino and Alexandra Daddario.