The Real Fault of San Andreas Is How It Maligns Californians

Even This Jaded Journalist Was Shaken By the Cynicism In Hollywood's Latest Disaster Movie

After sitting through a matinee of the new earthquake disaster movie San Andreas, I experienced my own dark seismic fantasy: as the Big One hits California, a giant hole opens up in the ground under Burbank, and Warner Bros. disappears into it forever.

I had been prepared—by the foreshocks of advance publicity—for Warner’s San Andreas to be a dumb film full of pseudoscientific nonsense about earthquakes. But San Andreas is much worse than that. Even for a jaded journalist, the film is so profoundly cynical and callous that to call …