Review of The Impossible (2012) by Jake H — 04 Sep 2013

A physical triumph in film-making.

A story (based on fact) centred around a family broken apart by the horrendous 2004 boxing day tsunami. The story is simple, will the family be reunited?

Coming off the back of his chilling film The Orphanage, exciting young director Juan Antonio Bayona delivers a hugely physical, sensory assault, especially in a ten-minute sequence of phenomenal effects work and thunderous sound design. The scene apparently took about a year to make, using real water, unlike many other CGI filled films. The extreme length of time spent on this small section of the film completely pays off. Its a superb piece of film-making, so loud and harrowing, you feel trapped, drowned, helpless. One of the best action scenes produced, Bayona creates something worthy of any Hollywood action epic. Definitely a director to watch for the future.

Another highlight of this feature is the acting from the lead cast. Ewan McGregor and Naomi Watts give emotional performances as Mum and Dad, while 16 year-old Tom Holland, manages to successfully transform his character from a moody teenager, to a boy determined to help anyone he can and help get his family back together, in a performance that is truly remarkable.

However, I feel Bayona takes this film slightly too Hollywood. To set this story around a wealthy white family, having a nice holiday go disastrously wrong, is not representative of the 200,000 plus that were killed by the tsunami, and the many more that were effected. With a film based on the horrendous natural disaster, I feel a film showing the effect that it had on the Thai people would have been more striking. It also seems that most of the people in the hospitals were tourists, what happened to everyone else?

Other than the terrific set and lead acting, the film disappoints as it fails to show the wider effect the tsunami had.

J.Henderson.

6/10.