Corrections to the blogosphere, the consensus, and the world

Thursday, April 06, 2017

The Clean Earthquake

Watched a bit of San Andreas last night, earthquake movie with the Rock, musing about how unspeakably vile the applauded morality was. The Rock has a wife and a daughter.  He flies into an earthquake with a helicopter, falling buildings all around, hundreds of thousands crushed, rescues his wife and nobody else, crashes helicopter. Steals car, drives off with wife and nobody else at a time when millions are trying to flee city. Finds plane, flies it in to earthquake, crashes it, that's one plane that's not going to join any evacuation.  Takes boat, rides tsunami into city to find and save daughter and, to be sure, her boyfriend. High-fives all round, all is well, the dead millions are npcs, survivor's guilt doesn't get a look in.
To conceal slightly the vicious disregard of the interests of everybody who isn't family the disaster has two modes - one populated, one not.  There are times when you see the streets full of people running, and at those times the family is running too; then the buildings fall, the tsunami hits, and everybody disappears, even as bodies, so there's nobody there to reproach the Rock for letting them die.  It's a sign, I suppose, that Americans won't blame Trump for nepotism; that's the ethos that their entertainment praises as the highest value in life.

Blogger Devin Faraci gets it right -
It is possible that San Andreas is the most morally despicable blockbuster ever made. It is a sickening paean to selfishness, a movie that lionizes a public servant rescue worker who abandons his job in the middle of the greatest natural disaster in the history of America to steal a rescue helicopter to save only his wife and daughter, leaving thousands to die and suffer in his wake. It is, frankly, sickening.

Very few of the other (generally critical) reviews touch on this, though.

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