The Impossible

 

With CG effects so commonplace in movies these days, it's very rare to be truly wowed, or to have those effects create much of an emotional impact.  In The Impossible, director Juan Antonio Bayona (The Orphanage) manages to recreate the events in 2004, when a tsunami hit coastal southern Asia.  It is a harrowing and heart-stopping sequence that tops even the highly impressive similar scene in Clint Eastwood's film, Hereafter, from a few years ago.  From there, the movie develops into a rare, powerful, and gripping tale of survival.  This late year release from 2012 (slowly getting a wide release) is one of the top films from last year.

The film mainly focuses on one particular family, and their experiences in the aftermath of the tragedy.  It is a true story, although the family has been changed from Spanish to British in the film.  The family includes father Henry (Ewan McGregor), mother Maria (Naomi Watts), and their three children Lucas (Tom Holland), Simon (Oaklee Pendergast) and Thomas (Samuel Joslin).  They have traveled to a luxury resort in Thailand for Christmas, and it is on December 26th, while the family is out in the resort's pool area that the tsunami strikes, completely obliterating the entire vacation spot, and separating the family from each other.  Maria and Lucas find each other, and struggle to find help, with Maria in desperate need of medical care, and having to rely on her son.  Henry and the two remaining boys manage to find each other in the ruins of the resort, and set about searching for Maria and Lucas.

This is an involving and frequently heartbreaking film that not only follows this family suddenly being split apart from each other by a natural disaster, but also the many other people whose lives are affected by it.  There is a scene where Lucas is in a makeshift hospital with his mother, and he begins to wander the halls.  Different people turn to the boy for help, wanting him to track down missing loved ones who may be in the building, but they are too weak or injured to look themselves.  We also see people hanging signs depicting missing family or friends on walls, hoping for any information they can find.  Even though this family is the main focus of the film, it spends plenty of time looking at the aftermath of the 2004 tragedy, and how it changed the lives of the locals, as well as the many people who were visiting on holiday when the wall of water struck.

Of the family members, the one who stuck out in my mind the most is Maria, and it is not just because of Naomi Watts' wonderful performance here.  She becomes gravely injured during her struggle to find a piece of debris to cling to for safety in the raging flood waters that follow the tsunami striking the resort.  She is sent to a local hospital, but her wounds are severe, and she seems to constantly slip in and out of consciousness.  Lucas, the eldest son, becomes somewhat of a protective figure to his mother, as he struggles to hold some form of hope alive for both of them.  These are the two characters that we follow the most during the film, and who garner the most emotional impact.  When Henry begins searching for his remaining family, we get some wonderful moments, such as when he connects with some other tourists, and tries to get a hold of a cell phone in order to contact someone back home to let them know that he is all right.  He makes the call, but can barely speak of the circumstances surrounding him, and he breaks down right there on the phone.  It is a powerful scene.

The Impossible is a straight forward film, but it's also supremely effective, thanks to just the raw emotional power that the screenplay by Sergio G. Sanchez is able to tap into.  The filmmakers have not only created a completely believable recreation of the terrible tragedy, but also what many people who survived must have gone through afterward.  Although there are a couple moments that scream of screenplay contrivance (the way Henry and Lucas are in the same building, and keep on barely missing each other), the movie for the most part feels genuine.  There are no phony crisis moments, no unnecessary characters, and nothing that seems tacked on or artificial.  Everything feels real, and I personally was captivated.  Here is a movie that could have easily been calculated and manipulative, but ends up being genuine.

 

This is the kind of movie you want your friends to go see as soon as possible, because you want to talk about it in detail with them.  It's a wonderful little movie, and one that hopefully will find an audience as it slowly expands wider.  Even with some very strong competition at the tail end of 2012, The Impossible stands out as probably one of the more emotional films I've seen in quite a while.

See the movie times in your area or buy the DVD at Amazon.com!

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