What ‘Skyscraper’ Doesn’t Get About Skyscrapers

A number of movies starring Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson have featured the destruction of a huge building. But his new one, Skyscraper, pretty much guarantees it right in the title. In Skyscraper, The Rock plays former FBI agent Will Sawyer, who, after losing his left leg below the knee in a botched hostage rescue, now works as a high-rise security specialist. He is hired by billionaire Zhao Long Ji (Chin Han) to assess the newly-finished top half of the Pearl, a 3,500-foot-tall, 240-story building in Hong Kong.

The sinuous CGI tower looks like a cross between the Shanghai Tower, a torqued skyscraper that opened in 2015, and another super-high-rise in the same city, the sphere-embellished Oriental Pearl TV tower. If the Pearl were real, it would reach considerably higher and have more floors than any existing tower. (The Burj Khalifa in Dubai, currently the world’s tallest building, is 2,700 feet high and has 163 floors.) There’s no reason a contemporary skyscraper couldn’t be this tall if someone was willing to finance it.