Director Brad Peyton, producer Beau Flynn and action star Dwayne Johnson who worked together before in the action family adventure hit “Journey 2: The Mysterious Island” are now back together again in this action thrilling event called “San Andreas”. The movie tells the story of Ray (played by Johnson), a rescue chopper pilot as he reunites with his estranged wife (played by Carla Gugino) in the midst of a cataclysmic earthquake that hits California, while trying to get from Los Angeles to San Francisco to rescue their daughter (Alexandra Daddario).

The movie with his amazing display of visual effects to depict the massive earthquake that levels both the cities of Los Angeles and San Francisco surprisingly attempts to offer something more than just thrills, chills and heroics portrayed by all of the main characters. It ends up telling a story of courage and the strength of family bonds, where its protagonists fight against one of the most destructive forces of nature in order to save each other.

Producer Beau Flynn explains how this project relates to his own personal experiences with earthquakes, “I move to Los Angeles from New York end of 1993 I went to NYU and I came out here with a dream to tell stories and make movies, three weeks later the Northridge earthquake occur and I’ve never been in a tremor or ever been familiar with earthquakes; like Dwayne I’m from Miami and very familiar with hurricanes but you do get a notice when a hurricane is coming and unfortunately you don’t with an earthquake.”

Flynn came to explain to us how it was his mother that encouraged him to continue living in the Los Angeles area even after going through such a traumatic experience, “I called my mom and said I’m moving back to New York and she said “why don’t you gut it out”, and that was incredible advise, and I really wanted to tell a story about a midst mother nature and this things that do happen globally; about people coming together as a community, and family reuniting and staying together and persevering and fighting through this.”

Actor Dwayne Johnson recalls how he got involved with the project and how he was captivated by the story as soon as he read it, “we where in Budapest shooting Hercules at that time another movie that Beau had produced, and I read the script then, I loved it, read it all the way through at 3:30 in the morning and I texted him and I said, I’m in. And it all came together fairly quickly in terms of the amazing actors who had the hands up and wanted to come in and play in the sandbox and really, hopefully play in a genre, redefine a genre that has been around for such a long period of time.” And it s true, this genre has been around for a very long time and it has been done over and over before, following some of the same characteristics that all disaster movies have; an extensive array of characters both good and bad, an examination of human nature and how bad can people behave when tragedy struck and of course a hero. Which in this case we have more than one, since every character in the story becomes a hero in its own.

As the story unfolds we follow the lives of not only Ray’s family (Johnson) but also that of a dedicated seismologist (played by Paul Giamatti) and an intrepid reporter played by Archie Pinjabi who try to warn the people about the true nature and destructiveness of the earthquake that shakes the entire state of California. It is Giamatti along with screen writer Carlton Cuse of “Lost” that begin to explain how the movie offers more than just action, adventure and close calls, but also tries to portray some sense of reality (within the realm of Hollywood of course) about people going through and surviving this sort of ordeal. After meeting some seismologists, Giamatti said, “Those guys are amazing I mean they’re not just intellectuals you know, is a real concern for those guys it’s not just a sort of discipline that’s sort of interesting intellectually. They’re deeply committed to trying and figure out a way to deal with these things.” Screen writer Carlton Cuse adds, “I talked to a bunch of seismologists when I was first working on the script and I felt it was really important to have this sort of spine in the movie be the seismology story who were actually kind of framing and contextualizing all the disaster that’s going on around.”

The story although fantastic in all the way Hollywood has to offer, attempts to ground it’s characters and turn them into credible, interesting and humane, going through the emotions like any body wood, in fact, according to Flynn, Director Brad Peyton was pretty insistent on the fact that in situations like this we can all appeal to our inner hero, “Brad spoke a lot about really what makes a hero and I love what Brad did and brought to this movie in terms of showing that everyone really kind of had a strength, a special strength like almost a super hero in a grounded and real way. It’s really fascinating the kind of flight or fight kind of mechanism that we all have, and it was just an area that Brad continuously brought up and all the cast up here contributed in way and made a difference and everyone can make a difference.”

The fact that the movie concentrates mostly on people its one of the reasons that most of the members of the cast were attracted to this project since they were hoping that after seeing the movie the audience would begin to question themselves about the possibility of something like this ever happening. Archie Pinjabi explains how she has been a stranger to natural disasters most of her life until she came to America and how this experience affected her, “Until I came to America I haven’t really been through any disasters and then as soon as I moved to New York hurricane Sandy hit me in quite a big way. I had 12 days without any electricity, any water and I think that the thing that I realized most from it was that we’d become so dependent on technology, you know there’s so much accessibility to information and suddenly when everything is cut off you’re completely lost, and you start asking sort of deeper profound questions which hopefully people will ask when they leave the film, you know, how powerful mother nature is, how short life is, how grateful we should be for things.”

In general terms, although both cities are completely destroyed by the earthquake, the movie posses an optimistic tone to it, where in contrast to other movies of the same genre, it focuses more on the heroics of the main characters and less in the awfulness of human nature and how disasters of this kind lead humanity into chaos, violence and disorder. In the end, after all is said and done and all that is left is ruble, there is still a chance for those who survived and rebuild their lives once again. This is why San Andreas in its own sense, could be the disaster movie for the whole family to enjoy this summer. It opens in theaters May 29^th.