User Reviews

At some point there was going to be a big budget film about this tragedy, so to hear there was one was not a surprise nor something that upset me since it was always coming. The film is based on the true story of a Spanish family who somehow managed to survive the disaster, finding each other and making it home alive, although here the family are played as English but they are the focal point. We waste very little time at the start in setting the characters before they get hit by a wall of special effects in a sequence that is impacting, upsetting and incredibly tense.

Visually there are some weaknesses in the effects but the camera-work covers a lot of them and the sound editing does the rest. In fact it is unfair to list the sound at the end of that sentence like an afterthought, because the sound in this sequence is amazing – it is everywhere and it is terrifying, even on a home stereo it still works. This is the real core of the film and it delivers because it stays with you the rest of the film as it should. From here the focus is more on the human tragedy, separated families, death, lack of information and so on. This aspects also works pretty well and is greatly helped by strong performances from Watts and McGregor but more importantly from the three boys, who are convincing throughout the film.

It is not without problems though. The focus on one family and their (comparatively) happy ending is a necessary evil, but it is still an "evil" in terms of the saying. The film spends a lot of time with holiday makers and westerners and not much with those living and working there; they are visible sure, but not much more that than. The decision to switch nationalities seems pointless and I'm not sure why they did it – they could easily have made the film in English with Spanish actors without it being less accessible and still appealing to the American market. This doesn't matter too much – but it does feel odd. Considering how well it impacts at some points, I also didn't understand why at other times it feels the need to really syrup on the emotion; the music is just what you expect and it comes up just when you know it will and it stirs upwards telling you what to feel; personally I didn't need it and it felt heavy handed too often.

That said, it is still an impacting film and is worth a look. It does have problems but mostly it gets past them by virtue of the subject matter and the mostly strong delivery. This film was always going to be made and for sure it could have been a lot weaker than this.

In "The Impossible," we are presented with a nice, blonde, sun-kissed English family (the Bennetts) when it fact the real family that the film is based on is a dark-haired, Spanish family, (the Belons.) This is even more mind-boggling when you realize that the director, Juan Antonio Bayona is a Spaniard. So much for verisimilitude.

The movie opens with the happy English family arriving at a plush Thai seaside resort and settling in for fun and games on a pristine beach with gin clear waters and later lounging at pool side. But wait! There's a distant rumble growing louder but only Maria (Naomi Watts) seems to notice it. Then with a crash, the wall of water arrives and all hell breaks loose. By some miracle the Bennett family including the three sons survives the tsunami after being tossed about amid the debris with only Maria suffering a serious leg injury. After the water recedes, we see the extent of the destruction, (real footage of the devastation?). But the only bodies or injured people that we see are fellow European tourists. Not one recognizable Thai local. And so the movie goes featuring only white tourists and their various travails. The Bennett family after wandering about and split up for a couple of days finally locate each other. After Maria has a life saving operation on her leg, the Bennets fly off in a chartered jet leaving the mess and the thousands of local dead behind them. Once again, white privilege counts for everything and the locals are left to fend for themselves.

Another of the many World Premieres showcasing at the Toronto International Film Festival with hopes of Oscar glory is, The Impossible, the true story of a family's struggle to reunite after being violently separated when the tsunami hit the beach of sun soaked Thailand in 2004. The film stars Ewan McGregor and Naomi Watts as the two parents of three young boys that were vacationing in Thailand over Christmas when the tsunami devastated the country and shocked the world. With a prerequisite set-up of the main characters, the tsunami hits early in The Impossible and packs an incredible punch. As the wave crashes through the hotels pool area and sweeps away the five members of the family, we watch in terror as Maria (Watts) and Lucas (Tom Holland) struggle to stay above the raging water and within arms lengths of each other. Once the water settles, the badly injured Maria and Lucas begin a journey of survival without knowledge as to the fate of the missing three members of the family. Lucas is forced to mature beyond his years and assist in getting his mother to a hospital for immediate emergency attention and is the key to the more emotional scenes that conclude the film. The Impossible is only the second film made using new 3-D sound technology (the film is in 2-D) and the crashing and fast flowing water sequences can be heard, and almost felt, throughout the entire theatre. When not fully engrossed in our characters' plights and emotionally tied to their survival, we are thoroughly repulsed by the graphic scenes of bodily destruction that blood soak the screen. Director J.A. Bayona is no stranger to horrific make-up effects as he was the genius behind the camera for The Orphanage (2007) and he pulls no punches here. Some audience members were seen turning their heads unable to ingest the graphic nature of effects and few were even seen exiting while the scenes played out in long detail. Thanks to the trailers, we know (generally) how the movie concludes. But just like Ron Howard's masterful Apollo 13, J.A. Bayona still keeps us at the edge of our seats even with an ending that is both clear and true to the original story. The Impossible does have its shot at some Awards glory. Watts and McGregor pull off incredibly emotional and physical scenes and films that deal with real life tragedy and the human spirit that overcomes those tragedies usually find favour with award voters. But whether or not The Impossible gets any gold plated hardware it does not take away from the tiring and emotional journey that audiences will take with their characters. The Impossible is the best depiction yet of the Indian Ocean tsunami and the horrors that succeeded it. It is also one of the best movies we have seen so far this year. Packed with equal scenes of tearful drama and graphic horrors. And although the wave is the catalyst that propels the plot, the characters are so strong that the big wave that hits the resort will hardly be the thing you most remember.

"Sufficiently advanced negligence is indistinguishable from malice." - Virginia Fell

December 26th, 2004. An earthquake in the Indian Ocean unleashes a violent tsunami. 50 foot waves hurtle toward Indonesia, Thailand, Sir Lanka and India. Coastal regions surrounding the Indian Ocean are devastated. Hundreds of thousands die or go missing. Millions are left homeless. As is always the case with natural disasters, the poor and the marginalised suffer the most, losing their lives, homes, possessions and/or livelihoods. When the waters recede, thousands more die due to contaminated drinking water and disease.

Within 15 minutes of the earthquake, the American weather bureau in Hawaii warns 26 countries to expect an imminent tsunami radiating from the quake's epicentre. None of the countries finally affected are deemed worthy of being notified. The Japanese weather bureau detects the quake but likewise fails to pass on its information. The Indian Air Force receives news of the quake/tsunami, but this news gets lost in bureaucracy and is not passed on. Thailand is alerted but officials dare not launch a national alert for fear of causing panic. Two years prior to the tsunami, the Inter-Governmental Oceanographic Commission predicts a possible quake/tsunami in the region and stresses the need to put in place early detection networks. Because Member States all view national tsunami warning and mitigation facilities as being "unprofitable", the Commission's cautions are ignored. Had the 2004 tsunami occurred in the Pacific Ocean, it would have been detected by the international tsunami warning system.

In the years leading up to the tsunami, environmentalists warn that the destruction of each country's "bio-shields" will exasperate the damage done by future tsunamis. They're ignored. Considered impediments to the South Asian economy, miles of coral reef are destroyed (via dynamite) and miles of coastal mangrove culled, all to make way for shipping lanes, shrimp farms, aquaculture industries and other economic choices (Thailand has lost half its mangrove cover over the past 2 decades). As predicted, areas stripped of their "natural" defences are hit the hardest by the tsunami. Where the mangrove/coral fields were left intact, no lives were lost and little damage done. To satiate economic interests, the poor, living precariously on the water's edge, are deemed a rational sacrifice. Following the tsunami, the damaged land – now "devalued" - is gobbled up by wealthy investors. The poor are pushed even further out and the strategically grabbed land reallocated for future tourism development.

Juan Bayona's "The Impossible", a film about the 2004 tsunami, bills itself as a film about "the triumph of the human spirit in the face of adversity". It was the "human spirit" that caused the adversity, but let's ignore that. Let's focus instead on some white tourists. They're played by Naomi Watts and Ewan McGregor, a British (?) couple who travel to Thailand with their two sons. On the way to their hotel, Watts reads some Joseph Conrad ("Heart of Darkness", "Typhoon"?), presumably because she loves symbolism. After much foreshadowing, a series of monster waves descend upon our white family. 300,000 deaths later, and the couple's son learns to be less of a jerk. The family hug and fly back to Disneyland, leaving Thailand behind. Things work out pretty well for them.

The film pretends to be about "universal goodwill", about how "tragedy brings people together". It's mostly relentlessly dehumanising. People do not matter unless they're white, the film filled with white victims and the white dispossessed. Local characters are either invisible or reduced to a couple rescue units at the bidding of white sufferers. Whilst many have complained that our foregrounded characters are white, that's not really the problem. The problem's that background characters are likewise. The fact that the vast majority of the dead, injured and displaced were Asian never registers. This has an interesting effect. In the way the film panders to white audiences whilst pretending to be about the universality of suffering, its message becomes, unconsciously, that nobody cares, and that target audiences identify only with their own. It's not economically feasible to cater to the Other. Of course it's fitting that a film about universal goodwill largely ignores the suffering of non-white characters. The real life event hinged on a similar social dismissal. A film about the plight of wealthy, vacationing Westerners which turns a blind eye to the deaths of thousands of locals perfectly sums up the lesson of the tsunami itself; they don't matter.

The film's built upon your typical Hollywood/Spielberg disaster/history movie formula ("Schindler", "Deep Impact" etc). We're reduced to being made to empathise with a handful of souls and then positioned to celebrate when our chosen few escape the fate of thousands around them. The formula works well as popcorn – it ably resorts to the usual shock tactics and horror clichés - but is also crass: we have to cheaply kill/maim others in order to engender the basest of emotions. Along the way we ourselves are dehumanised, made complicit in dehumanising those who are sacrificed for closure and our chosen few. McGregor would defend the film's racial politics by comparing criticisms levelled against it to those levelled against "Black Hawk Down". But "Down" was a sinister, similarly racist film which posited American Colonialists as victims of a historical situation in which they were precisely the victimisers, responsible for all manners of evil, namely backing brutal puppet dictators (Siad Barre et al), destabilising (and waging proxy wars with) Somlia and Ethiopia, genocide, bankrupting Somalia, manufacturing famine, assassinating revolutionary leaders, engendering untold amounts of bloodshed, arming psychos, enforcing media blackouts and waging a secret war on the democratically elected Islamic Courts Union for the specific aim of stopping any semblance of nationhood in Somalia (all at the behest of Conoco, Amoco, Chevron, Phillips etc). "Black Hawk Down's" not a defence, it's the problem.

6/10 – Generic, well acted, white-centric, self-absorbed FX porn. Needs a laugh track and Morgan Freeman giving his "Deep Impact" speech in front of a Thai Restaurant.

An account of a family caught, with tens of thousands of strangers, in the mayhem of one of the worst natural catastrophes of our time.

First, let us talk about the Oscar nomination for Naomi Watts. I get it. She did a fine job here looking beat up and nearly dead. That probably deserves a nomination. But her performance is overshadowed by that of the young Tom Holland, who received no such nomination. So, to me, if he is not eligible, she should not win. Is that fair? Maybe, maybe not. But that is how I feel -- Tom Holland carried this picture.

Beyond that, I have mixed feelings. The tsunami effects were incredible and I really felt the panic involved. But we have here an English family that gets separated -- and they all survive and become reunited within one or two days (I am a bit fuzzy on the timeline). Sure, this really happened (although the family was Spanish -- and I find it odd that a Spanish production company did not use Spanish actors). But it seems too clean, even with all the danger and death.

Sure, the film is "the impossible", which would imply that this should not have happened but did. Yet, to put a basically happy ending on a tragedy that killed 230,000 people seems insulting to me. Apparently others have called it "whitewashed". I do not think that is the case -- that term is too extreme -- but I have to wonder why we have to focus on a family who seemingly came out unscathed. Where is a family that did not?

Roger Ebert gave the film a perfect rating and called it "one of the best films of the year". This to me signals Ebert's growing disconnect with reality. If he means "one of the 50 best", then yes. But I assume he means more like ten best, and that is just plain wrong.

This telling about the 2004 tsunami that killed in excess of 250,000 people hit both critical acclaim and controversy when it was released . Naomi Watts was Oscar nominated as best actress but there were some outcries that the characters had been changed from Spanairds to Anglo-Saxons for no good reason . This wasn't a case of arrogant Hollywood changing characters in order to bring audience identification to a true life story because THE IMPOSSIBLE is in fact a Spanish film with a Spanish production team and one wonders why the producers couldn't have put some native Spanairds in front of the camera ? Would the film have suffered if we had Javier Bardem and Penelope Cruz playing Henry and Maria ? There wouldn't have even needed to speak in their native tongues

Where THE IMPOSSIBLE does succeed is in the devastating spectacle of the tsunami itself which has to be seen to be believed and is a technical miracle in film making . The fall out from this tidal wave which ended hundreds of thousands of human lives is well realised but from a dramatic point of view is very flawed . You see both Maria and her son Lucas both survive the disaster and are separated from Henry and the two other sons Tomas and Simon who believe Maria and Lucas are dead . Of course the audience know they aren't which means we're one step ahead of Henry . Put it like this - the story would have worked much , much better if the story had been told entirely through Henry's eyes where the audience are put through his point of view where he believes his wife and son are dead only to have to the audience to experience great joy at the end when he finds out Maria and Lucas have survived . It might have meant Naomi Watts missing out on an Oscar nomination but would have made for a more dramatic film . As it stands Watts performance and the tsunami scene are by far the best things about a film that's not as good as it could have been