Think back to the first time you went to the beach as a kid. Try to remember the joy of building your first sand castle—using your sand pail to craft perfectly smooth turrets, digging a circle around the structure and letting the ocean water run just to the edge to fill in the moat, maybe even grabbing a wayward stick to use as a makeshift flag. Didn't that feel rewarding, building something all on your own? Okay, now try to remember the eclipsing joy of destroying that sand castle, stomping it back to its original existence.
For some reason, destruction is something that's extremely pleasing to us (at least when the stakes are right). It's a major tenet of action movies. Maybe we innately appreciate being humbled, seeing our hubris checked by the toppling of the Empire State Building. Maybe seeing something so breathtaking like Big Ben blown to bits makes us feel like we're invincible and never going to die. Or maybe, as Michael Caine says, some people just want to watch the world burn. I remember seeing the trailer for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, where the Eiffel Tower goes down, and, for one reason or another, being like fuuuuuuuuuck that's dope. You know how it goes.
Action movies and video games blowing up cities and famous buildings isn't anything new, but there's some weirdly specific destruction happening in movies right now: Hollywood fucking hates San Francisco and is consistently burning that city to the ground.
Somewhere in between watching (mild spoilers on the way) the Transamerica Pyramid go down and the Golden Gate Bridge ripped to shreds by a school bus in Terminator: Genisys I thought to myself, "Why does this feel so familiar?" And then I remembered seeing the bridge bow back and forth in the trailer for San Andreas; and apes crossing it to burn an already destroyed San Fran to the ground in Dawn of the Planet of the Apes; and Godzilla walking through it in 2014's Godzilla; and a kaiju using it as a step ladder in Pacific Rim. When I finally realized that Big Hero 6, an animated kids movie, partly laid waste to San Fransokyo, an SF hybrid city, my brain exploded. Even Disney wants this place wiped out. (Also, not that Inside Out had San Fran burning, but that movie's overall take on the city was, "This place is trash.")
So what's up, people who make movies? Why have six movies in less than two years depicted the demise of The Bay? Did everyone besides The Avengers forget that New York City exists?
"San Francisco just felt like the best playground—no offense to them," Godzilla director Gareth Edwards told ScreenRant, presumably while cackling maniacally.
San Fran has some natural characteristics that lend itself to blockbuster destruction—its positioning on the San Andreas Fault and its history of (sometimes massive) earthquakes make it an easy choice for natural disaster flicks. In this way, San Andreas gets a pass, since picking the Bay City as a locale is merely a matter of realism. The Golden Gate Bridge is also one of those iconic landmarks, like the Eiffel Tower or the Empire State Building or your first sand castle, that we all enjoy seeing crumble to the ground. So yeah, San Francisco is a pretty ill playground.
But there might be one other reason—and be forewarned, it's about to get conspiracy-ish up in here—why SF keeps getting blown up, and that reason is laid out pretty clearly in Terminator: Genisys. In Genisys (more spoilers ahead), the enemy is still the sentient machine network, Skynet, but their plan of attack is not to go Terminator-guns-blazing into combat—it's to enslave the entire human population through—wait for it—an app. In the movie, we're told by dumb sheeple that Genisys is the end-all, be-all smartphone application that will connect everything and completely advance society (Hi, Singularity Theory!). At times, Genisys and the company that makes it, Cyberdyne, sounds a lot like Google (a company based an hour outside of San Francisco); other times, like how there's a hype-building countdown and a gaudy press conference for the app's release, it's totally reminiscent of Apple (a company based 40 minutes outside of San Francisco). The anti-technology sentiment is fierce in Terminator: Genisys, all the way until the end, when an idyllic farm setting is made to look like a paradise in comparison to the rubble of San Francisco. So am I saying that Hollywood is rebelling against Silicon Valley, and by proxy the city intertwined with it? YES OF COURSE THAT'S WHAT I'M SAYING.
With the advent of streaming and downloading technology, the entertainment industry has taken massive hits. Pulling up YouTube or Netflix on your iPhone is an easier an option than going to a movie theater, and even beyond that, the internet has made it unbelievably easy to see movies illegally, without paying a cent for them. "A lot of people in LA feel as though the Valley guys are pirates and don't respect content," tech investor Troy Carter told Recode in 2014. In the same article, Jimmy Iovine noted the entertainment world's animosity towards the tech world: "There's a fear, there's an intimidation and there's that insecurity and overconfidence."
The tech industry is disrupting Hollywood's formerly comfortable success—and in turn, Hollywood is destroying their city. Either that, or action movies have just really taken to San Francisco's temperate climate. Stay woke, Bay Area.
