I saw this film when it first came out, and I would love to see it again. The plot reminds me of "The Bridge at San Luis Rey," a novel by Thornton Wilder, as it explores what was going on in the victims' lives before the disaster. In the Wilder novel, a priest in colonial Peru, South America, questions whether people live by chance or by design interpreted as God's will. After the bridge collapses and kills several down-on-their-luck people, the priest investigates the backgrounds of the victims. He then concludes that God had His reasons for cutting short the lives of these people who had no further purpose in life or happiness in store for them. The victims in "Smash-Up" are shown to have similar things going on in their lives. In "Smash-Up" I thought it especially tragic that the teen-age couple were mistaken as criminals when they really were innocent and were on their way to see the whales off the coast at Big Sur. Being deceased, they could not defend themselves, and their reputations were tainted by the incorrect assumption about their supposed guilt. The viewer is left to imagine the tragic impact on the victims' families. Because of the similarity to Wilder's novel, I believe "Smash-Up" does have a meaning and a message. By the way, Wilder's novel was made into a relatively recent movie with Gabriel Byrne as the priest, and it bears the same title as the novel, "The Bridge at San Luis Rey."
Review of Smash-Up on Interstate 5
