2015’s The Wave was a pleasantly surprising disaster-action export from Norway. At its center was Kristoffer Joner as a geologist at a station where they monitor sensors in an unstable mountainside. His intuition is stronger than the sensors, and his actions start residents of a nearby town evacuating before a landslide, and resulting tidal wave, kill everybody.
Sequel The Quake comes three years after that film, both in the timeline of the series and the actual years between releases. Despite being heralded as a savior for his earlier actions, Jones is haunted by the deaths of those he had been unable to save. His young daughter freaks out when she sees a room where he has covered the walls with images of those people. I’m not sure why she was so weirded out by this—it isn’t like he has become a Kennedy assassination obsessive or he’s built a shrine to a teen pop idol.
His daughter had only been visiting, as he is estranged from his family. Sometime between the two movies, matriarch Ana Dahl Torp left with their children for Oslo. When we catch up with her there, we see she working at yet another hotel. Given how resourceful she was during the emergency in the earlier film, I thought she would have moved into something more lucrative.
Once again, Joner will become aware of a growing threat before anybody else is aware of it. In this case, it is a pending earthquake, one that may even be more powerful than a devastating occurrence one hundred years prior.
He fails to convince corporate stooge Stig Amdam this event is imminent. As somebody who is over a monitoring station for the city, Amdam seems to be inexplicably in denial about the evidence right before him. Is there a covert pro-earthquake lobby paying this guy to look the other way? Even weirder, when the quake hits, he and his staff take shelter without bothering to sound the public warning sirens. You had one job, people…
The person who tipped Joner off to the looming threat is a former colleague, played by Per Frisch. Unfortunately, Frisch isn’t around to personally relay to the other man the information he has gathered, as he dies minutes after we see him enter a tunnel service area from which he has been taking core samples. It wasn’t clear if he was killed by a gas leak or a tunnel collapse, but I’m blaming the pro-earthquake cabal.
Katherine Thorborg Johansen plays Frisch’s daughter, and it is through her that Joner gets the voluminous data and core samples the deceased has been collecting. This young woman may be one of the most unnecessarily burdened characters I have ever seen. While she’s trying to organize her dad’s funeral and get his estate in order, Joner runs roughshod over her life.
He won’t leave Frisch’s house while she’s trying to complete essential tasks, when he could just take the materials with him. He has her drive them to the tunnel where her father died, trespass into the closed tunnel, and risk both of their lives at the site where Frisch expired. Joner will also have her drive him to his daughter’s performance at the opera house downtown and then to the Radisson where his wife works. By the time the movie is over, she will have risked her own life in order to save his daughter’s. I have no idea why she puts up with any of this.
There is way too much drama here, for a sequel to a picture in which we were barely introduced to the main characters. Given we don’t have much of an emotional investment in these people, it is odd how much of the film is concerned with the interpersonal struggles of characters who still aren’t fleshed out very well.
And it takes way too long to get to the action. There’s also probably too little of it for most viewers, though I don’t know how much can be done with this setup. We spend too much time with people we still never get to know very well, and I did not care to know the better. Then a massive earthquake happens and it destroys Oslo. Roll credits. You can’t say this is a spoiler—would you have been happy to watch a film with this title and have there not be an earthquake?
The setpieces in his film often reminded me of the imaginings of little kids as they play with action figures, or the goofy games we used to come up with at that age. Most of the setups here are not too far from “the floor is lava”, especially when most of the main characters find themselves on the top floor of the hotel as the floor angles sharply downward. This leads to moments like them having to rush out of the way as a piano barrels its way from one end of the room to the other. People also repeatedly slide along the floor, frantically grabbing for anything to stop them from flying out the windows.
What’s odd is how unbelievable these scenes are, even when those in the previous film were even more ridiculous. The Wave had preposterously long underwater scenes, but I still watched them breathlessly (well, I was probably nowhere near as breathless as those on the screen, who could magically stay submerged for minutes on end). I’m not sure how sound the physics are in The Quake, but I never lost myself in the action scenes.
The special effects are good in these sequences, though they weren’t anything I thought superior to similar films of its time. Once again, I was more impressed with what the earlier film had done, even with technology that, just by being the older of the two, was not as advanced.
The Quake is an odd movie. I felt a fair amount of affection for The Wave, but didn’t think it needed a sequel. Having seen its follow-up, I can only confirm one wasn’t necessary. Still, it may appeal to those who were especially taken with its predecessor. Just be prepared to spend significantly more time with the leads from the first film, people I found I didn’t need to know anything more about.
Dir: John Andreas (hey, like the fault!) Anderson
Starring Kristoffer Joner, Ane Dahl Torp, Kathrine Thorborg Johansen
Watched on Magnet blu-ray