The Great Los Angeles Earthquake (1990)

It's an amazing and heartbreaking story.

Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.

The movie really just wants to entertain people.

If you're a disaster film buff, you've seen this movie a dozen times already. It's the same old story--an expert anticipates a major disaster about to happen, tries to warn everybody, and predictably, no one listens to him until it's too late. Disaster strikes, and loads of people die. A grave lesson is learned.In spite of The Great Los Angeles Earthquake going down the same beaten path as every other disaster film, I've gotta admit that I was pleasantly surprised by it, as it did a few things a little differently. First of all, the protagonist was female (Clare Winslow, played by Joanna Kerns). That was a refreshing touch. Also, one of the protagonist's family members became an antagonist (in this case, her husband, Steve). Lastly, the movie handled the antagonists in a more realistic way than disaster movies in the past. Usually, the antagonists were either mustache twirling villains or unreasonable for no real reason. The people who go against Clare are doing so because they're either arrogant or too hung up on the "now" of economics and real estate development to care about the future. Other things I liked about this film: the theme song was amazing and sounded very Irwin Allen-esque. I could definitely hear the homage to 1970s disaster films like The Poseidon Adventure and The Towering Inferno. The special effects were surprisingly good for a film that was shot on a TV budget. The earthquake scenes were incredibly well shot and had me riveted the entire time. They were even better than the special effects in Earthquake.With that being said, The Great Los Angeles Earthquake had its flaws that kept it from being great. The side characters and their subplots were not at all interesting. I wanted to be engaged but they were pretty much cookie cutter and interchangeable. There was one death scene that was supposed to be shocking but was very predictable. There was an assassination subplot involving a South African politician that weakened the movie considerably, not because of how irrelevant it was but because it showed that the writers had a lack of faith in their own material. Too bad because The Great Los Angeles Earthquake would've been a much stronger film without this lame subplot.Other than these flaws, The Great Los Angeles Earthquake was fairly good. Not brilliant, of course, but a lot better than you'd expect for a 1990 TV movie.

Describing what could happen in the future, the film combines formulaic character subplots with terrific visuals in the second half to convey a fictional but realistic story of people caught up in their own private dramas before and during a devastating earthquake.There are a couple of problems here. The first relates to the subplots; there are too many, resulting in an unnecessarily long run-time of about three hours. The assassination subplot seemed a bit hokey. At least 30 minutes probably could have been cut out without affecting the quality of the overall story. Because of so many speaking parts, I lost track of how some characters connected to other characters.Also, the sound quality in the copy I watched was not very good. At times I could not understand the dialogue; it seemed muffled.But of course viewers aren't really watching the film for the melodrama. They're watching for the disaster that's about to befall the characters. And the visuals during and after the earthquake are spectacular, every bit as good as in the 1974 film "Earthquake", if not better. Attention to detail is terrific. A lot of time and effort went into the visuals of this film, and it shows.Casting of main parts is fine; the cast of extras is enormous. Overall acting is average, though I thought Joanna Kerns, as the lead character, gave an especially credible performance. Production design was far higher here than we would expect for a TV movie.And I think it is indeed the "TV movie" label that brings down the cumulative rating for this film. Actually, "The Big One" is closer to a blockbuster theatrical release than it is to the stereotyped image of made-for-TV movie that viewers have come to expect. Unnecessarily lengthy subplots notwithstanding, if the viewer can watch the film for what it is, sans TV label, the viewer will enjoy it all the more.

This movie wasn't bad, as it dealt with the biggest earthquake Los Angeles could have. The film focuses equally on the preparation the city makes and the actual earthquake itself. All in all, not too bad, with decent performances.** 1/2 out of ****

"The Big One: The Great Los Angeles Earthquake" is a chilling, well-made disaster film that was made-for-TV and aired on NBC back in the fall of 1990 as a two-part movie. Joanna Kerns (star of TV's "Growing Pains") stars as a seismologist who worries that the earthquake of the title is going to strike Los Angeles. But before she can make her prediction, she crosses paths with her family members, co-workers, and city officials. The movie is long at times (this review is based on the entire four hour movie that ran when it premiered on NBC, not the shortened home video version) but it kept me interested and entertained through its entire four hours. The second time the movie aired on NBC they cut an hour of footage and shortened it to a three hour film. That version was pretty good too. But then I saw the home video version with half the movie gone. This is the version to forget about. Stick with either the three hour version or the full-length four hour version if you can find it on TV.The three and four hour versions: *** (out of four)The home video version: ** (out of four)