May 29, 2015 -- I was in the mood for a big, dumb disaster movie when I saw this yesterday, and this one delivers on both counts. It has plenty of explosions and destruction on a massive scale, but for all that, a lot of time is spent on discussions about feelings and relationships in this movie. This is like a Jane Austen earthquake disaster movie.

Irwin Allen made a fortune with disaster movies like “The Poseidon Adventure” and “The Towering Inferno” in the 1970s. The formula is simple. First, you introduce the characters, explain their relationships, and then you start killing them off during a series of adventures which test their survival skills. Circumstances in disaster movies cause women to remove clothing as the film progresses and they are rescued by manly men. This film is very much in the Irwin Allen tradition.

There are certain clichés in these kinds of films, such as the “dog” rule: You can kill all the people you want, but the dog always survives. There are no dog characters in this film, so that rule is avoided. Another rule is the “selfish death” rule: Characters who would rather save themselves than rescue others always die gruesome deaths. If only it worked that way in real life.

Another disaster movie convention is the “lone expert” in which some scientist predicts what will happen, but nobody believes him at first (like the Mayor of Amity ignoring the shark danger in “Jaws”). In this film, Paul Giamatti plays the role of a scientist who predicts the earthquakes, but in this case, he is believed by the powers that be and lives are saved (in real life you usually get the same kind of reaction that climate scientists get when they warn people about climate change).

The main character in this movie is Dwayne Johnson of “Furious Seven” who plays a rescue helicopter pilot going through a divorce and suffering from guilt over the loss of a child who drowned. This is where the movie bogs down with the pilot and his wife (played by Carla Gugino) talking at length about their personal problems in the midst of one of the greatest disasters in human history. I guess they never heard the line about the problems of three little people not amounting to a hill of beans in this crazy world.

The movie starts off with a daring rescue of a woman in a car on the edge of a canyon, then it transitions into the earthquakes. The first quake destroys Hoover Dam in Nevada and the others destroy Los Angeles and San Francisco. Although the movie gets the geology, physics and structural architecture wrong, the images of destruction are impressive. Some of the scenes in the film reminded me of the film “2012,” which is the ultimate disaster movie, such as aircraft dodging falling buildings and subway cars flying through the air.

Other characters in the film include Blake (played by the shapely Alexandra Daddario of “Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters”) daughter of the rescue pilot and her newfound friends, Ben (Hugo Johnstone-Burt) and Ollie (Art Parkinson) who are trying to escape the destruction in San Francisco, while others are trying to survive in Los Angeles. The actors do a fine job in this film, with Dwayne Johnson doing surprisingly well in some touchy-feely emotional scenes.

While the story is predictable and laugh-out-loud silly at times, it certainly delivers on the kind of spectacle you expect in this kind of big budget effects-driven movie. I saw this in 3D and the three dimensional effects were good. This film rates a C+.

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