The Quake: A damn fine sequel that will leave you breathless

John Andreas Andersen’s The Quake, a sequel to the excellent 2015 Norwegian disaster film The Wave, should be required viewing for all of today’s Hollywood franchise jockeys. It shows you how to make one of these things without sacrificing your characters’ souls (or your own, for that matter). In the earlier movie, the entire side of a mountain spectacularly collapsed into a fjord, setting off a massive, 250-foot tsunami that consumed the small picturesque town of Geiranger.

When The Quake starts, the geologist who tried to warn everybody at the time, Kristian Eikjord (Kristoffer Joner), is now being hailed as a national hero — but even before he opens his mouth, we know that he’s still traumatized by the event, and by all the lives he couldn’t save. As we watch him prepare for a TV interview, our view is obstructed by a giant screen showing images of the devastation; he regularly seems dwarfed by everything around him, as if he might be losing his sense of self.

For all the sensitivity with which its characters have been drawn, The Quake has been conceived (by screenwriters John Kåre Raake and Harald Rosenløw-Eeg, who also wrote The Wave) with all the delirious, what-if imagination of an intricate engineering experiment. Much of the action in the film’s second half takes place in the topmost section of a Radisson Blu which has been left teetering precariously after another falling building took out much of what’s below.

And each tilt, each crack, each secondary collapse feels like it has been thought through in all its geometric and physical implications — which just makes everything that much more nerve-racking. (In its broad strokes, this setpiece recalls a key one from Transformers: Dark of the Moon, and even though that’s one of the better Transformers entries, The Quake’s variation feels so much more honest, detailed, and, yes, exciting.) If anything, The Quake might be a little too good.

The Wave had a certain far-fetched romanticism that reminded us in its final act that we were, after all, watching a movie, with all the unlikely but welcome developments that come with such a thing: families reunited, remnants of communities restored, and so on. The destruction in The Quake is more total, more hopeless, and more convincing. And without giving too much away, let’s just say that by the time it fades out, we’re not at all convinced that things will ever be okay again. I can’t wait for the sequel.