Although the film, with spectacular scenes about an earthquake, lacks the level of Hollywood films, it has in its favor a point of view that highlights the courage, discipline and energy of a society.
A scene from “Magnitude 9.5 Earthquake”, the disaster film by Oxide Pang Chun
This catastrophe genre film from China does not reach the level set by North American cinema in the ’70s, but it is still entertaining. Happens all kinds of events and explosions from the first minute, there is a lot of unfolding, a few touches of innocent epic, and the end has a scene of honest emotion. The excuse: after some earthquakes, an unforeseen, endless chain of explosions arises in a waste warehouse that expands throughout an industrial park of chemical plants and threatens to destroy the entire city of Guancheng with its buildings, inhabitants and pets in a few minutes. .
There is a precedent, the explosion of chemical tanks in the port of Tianjin, in 2015, where, according to official figures, only about a hundred people died. It stands to reason that something even worse could happen at any moment. But this is not a film of denunciation, but of propaganda. Thus we see how, upon the first news of the disaster, a so-called National Industrial Accident Response Plan is immediately deployed, with all fire personnel perfectly enlisted, trained, uniformed and equipped with very modern elements, such as an army of drones that locate survivors as they buzz overhead like flies, and robot tanks that arrive spewing water just as the film’s heroes seem about to be engulfed in flames.
The heroes are, of course, the firefighters, who come from saving a kitten and soon must save a group of schoolchildren cornered on a terrace, and look for a way to rescue the fallen workers here and there under the rubble. They don’t have a minute’s rest, but at least one of them remembers his father’s upcoming birthday. Will he get to celebrate it? If this were an American film we are sure that everything will end in a birthday celebration. But it is Chinese, and the values of love of work, discipline, energy, obedience and sacrifice are emphasized throughout. Misfortune lurks in the ranks of heroes.
Meanwhile, in the pages of the script, the comfort of commonplaces lurks, and the lack of practice in composing something more than cliches. No matter, the director happily flies over those minutiae. The director is Oxide Pang Chun, who, alone or with his twin brother Danny Pang Fat, has made all kinds of filmsbasically horror, like “The eye” and “The messengers”and action, like “Bangkok Dangerous”, which they later remade in Hollywood with Nicolas Cage (here it premiered as “Bangkok in danger”). And also one of firefighters fighting the fire, “The Tower of Hell”. Be careful not to confuse with “Hell in the tower”the overproduction of Irwin Allen from which there is still much to learn.
“Earthquake Magnitude 9.5” (Jing tian jiu yuan, China. 2022); Dir.: Oxide Pang Chun; Int.: Jian Du, Quianyuang Wang,
Source: Ambito
I am an author and journalist who has worked in the entertainment industry for over a decade. I currently work as a news editor at a major news website, and my focus is on covering the latest trends in entertainment. I also write occasional pieces for other outlets, and have authored two books about the entertainment industry.
