Brow Beat

San Andreas Is Even Sillier Without Special Effects

To state the obvious, watching San Andreas is not an intellectual experience: The film deals in deeper, more universal pleasures, like watching Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson save his scattered family amidst scenes of mass destruction. Still, though the movie operates at a fairly high register of ridiculousness, it gets even more ludicrous once you remove its millions of dollars’ worth of special effects.

That’s the upshot of this very funny video, which the folks at Sploid assembled by poring over the film’s B-roll footage and comparing scenes from before and after all that digital destruction was added. As ever, it’s uncanny to see the disparity between an awkward shooting process and the grim CGI-realism of the final product.