An unforgiving tsunami tore Oslo apart in the Norwegian box office smash The Wave three years ago. Following this success, director Roar Uthaug was promoted (or demoted?) to the league of Hollywood reboots and helmed the new Tomb Raider.
Stepping up to helm the sequel, The Quake, is cinematographer-turned-director John Andreas Andersen. One would assume it was Uthaug who returned to the director’s chair after seeing The Quake, for it’s a largely similar viewing experience. Maybe a little too similar.
Disaster strikes again
Surviving geologist Kristian Eikjord (Kristoffer Joner), returns to the forefront following the events of The Wave, which saw him and his family barely get out alive. Heavily afflicted by PTSD, he struggles to maintain a normal family dynamic which leaves him living alone somewhere, nowhere, estranged from his wife and children.
The death of a colleague prompts Kristian to investigate the circumstances in which his fellow brother-in-environmental-arms died and the conclusion is that there’s an impending event that could be meaner than the avalanche – a seismic earthquake. To write about the rest of the film, it would be (justifiably) cheating to simply copy and paste an average review of The Wave and call it a day.
Less exhilarating the second time
That would be too easy, though, and possibly a tiny bit inaccurate – sadly, The Quake just isn’t as good as its predecessor. It loses a lot of the novelty of the first one, where seeing the tsunami generated through state-of-the-art special effects was genuinely spectacular. There’s a lot of focus on the protagonists trapped atop an injured skyscraper, a scenario that was marginally more exciting to watch in last year’s Skyscraper even if only for the fact that Dwayne Johnson is more charismatic than the Norwegian star here, whose performance is stunted by a monotonous depiction of post-trauma.
Where this disaster movie does match up to its fore-bearer is in its delivery of spades of human drama. The personal element was a strong suit of the The Wave and returning screenwriters John Kåre Raake and Harald Rosenløw-Eeg ensure that we spend a satisfactory amount of time getting to know these characters further so as to create a stronger emotional connection between us and them. We’re greatly enabled to root for the Eikjord family and the deceased colleague’s daughter Marit (Kathrine Thorborg Johansen) to be saved when Kristian has to play the part of hero again.
The downside is a cliched presentation of familial bonds in times of disaster, echoed in several similar films (including, again, Skyscraper), but on the other hand it’s quite refreshing to see such an amount of devoted to simpler character development – the expected narrative path for the second film may have been to fill it with more bombast.
The Quake: Conclusion
Following up the blockbuster hit that was The Wave, The Quake repeats a lot of the same beats assuming it’ll be another sure-fire success but ultimately suffers from a mild case of sequelitis. The audience that will benefit the most from this adventure will be the viewers who haven’t seen The Wave, for this serves as an example of a disaster film where the characters come first whilst also impressing in its use of special effects – a feat not always accomplished in Hollywood. Nonetheless, for those viewers, I would still recommend to see The Wave instead.
How do you think The Quake compares to The Wave? Let us know in the comments below!
The Quake has been released in US cinemas and is set to release on Blu-Ray & DVD on March 19th 2019. The release date for the UK is currently unconfirmed. Click here for release dates in other countries.
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