Do you think only Hollywood can create believable destruction and disaster action on an epic scale? Then you probably don’t know the work of the Norwegian production house Fantefilm. Over the past decade, the Scandinavians have created three of the most spectacular-looking works on the subject: ‘The Wave’, ‘The Quake’ and ‘The North Sea’. You can enjoy the middle one for free on TV later in the evening.
“The Quake – The Big Quake” will be broadcast today, March 17, 2024 at 10:25 PM on RTL Two. Alternatively, the FSK-16 title is available as Blu-ray, DVD or paid video-on-demand:
If you are an Amazon Prime customer, you can also watch the thriller there streaming for free*. All you have to do is register for the seven-day free trial of the FilmTotal channel. If you do not want to cancel again, you will pay 3.99 euros per month after the trial period.
“The Quake” on RTL Zwei: That’s the story
The last time a major earthquake struck the Norwegian capital Oslo was in 1904. This natural event was particularly devastating at the time because the epicenter was located directly in the so-called Oslo Trench, which runs straight through the city.
Today, when a road tunnel suddenly and unexpectedly collapses, a friend of Kristian Eikjord (Kristoffer Joner) is killed. During his research, the geologist, who is still traumatized after another serious catastrophe some time ago, finds signs that another earthquake of comparable magnitude to the one that occurred more than 100 years ago could occur in the near future.
Kristian desperately tries to warn the authorities and the media, but no one believes him. But it will soon prove fatal how right he was. For the already psychologically damaged man, a real nightmare begins with the battle for the survival of his family (Ane Dahl Torp, Jonas Hoff Oftebro, Edith Haagenrud-Sande)…
Believably grand and epic
In terms of the protagonist’s mental state, ‘The Quake’ builds on ‘The Wave’, which was released three years earlier. Even though it is actually worth catching up on, it is not essential to know the predecessor to fully enjoy “The Quake”. Everything we need to know is explained briefly, concisely and coherently at the beginning. Moreover, it is the visual aspects that really come into their own in the second half of the film that make the work of director John Andreas Andersen (“The North Sea”) so attractive.
It’s amazing how believably powerful and epic – you can see it in the trailer above – the force of nature rages here. The Norwegian creators of the project had only a fraction of the budget available to Hollywood destruction experts like Michael Bay (“Transformers 1-5”), Roland Emmerich (“Independence Day”) and Peter Berg (“Deepwater Horizon”) for their Glasses are regularly hit on the head.
Even though he can of course easily beat them in terms of effects, Andersen refreshingly does not try to copy the blockbusters of his great colleagues. It starts with the fact that he doesn’t send Mark Wahlberg, Will Smith or Dwayne Johnson as muscular superheroes in everyday clothes to save the world. In ‘The Quake’ the focus is on an average man with a lot of personal baggage, convincingly embodied by Kristoffer Joner (‘The Revenant’). His fight against the elements (and his own weaknesses) seems much more realistic and accessible to us as viewers than that of one of the typical dream factory plane men.
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