All shook up

So, Wonder Wife and I have been favored with some streaming serendipity lately in the form of two movies that we just happened to come across while browsing, each of which was a total blast. here's the first.

The Quake is the Norwegian disaster film that is the sequel to The Wave, which won all kinds of awards and broke all kinds of records in Norway and around the world. Like the original film, this follow-up features Hollywood-style special effects and spectacle while maintaining focus on the individual characters, who we can really care about. It helps that all of them, even (or especially) the main protagonist, Kristian, are cut from decidedly unheroic cloth, and the image of these everyday people coping with an unbelievable natural disaster has a lot more power than watching The Rock stunting his way through the same sort of scenes.

Kristian, the ever-suffering geologist, having played Cassandra once before when a tsunami wiped out his fjordside hometown, finds himself once again sounding the alarm before the earth moves in Oslo and once again being unheeded  by the official bureaucracy - all while contending with PTSD, depression, a failed marriage, and estrangement from his kids. He's a total Nordic Job, and we feel for him every step of the way.

And the action scenes are terrific: tense, suspenseful, edge of your seat stuff. This is no slow-moving character study; the producers have earned their action-film moves well, and once things start shaking, you're in for thrill ride.

Walaka's predication: there will be a third film in the franchise (there's a literal handoff to a new character that I expect to see more of) and it will be.... The Storm.

See this movie.