Movie Review - The Impossible

Critic's Rating: 3.5 out of 5 Stars
Cast: Ewan McGregor, Naomi Watts, Tom Holland
Direction: Juan Antonio Bayona
Genre: Drama
Duration: 1 hour 52 minutes

Story: The Impossible is a true story of a family's bravery and endurance in the aftermath of 2004's deadly tsunami.

Movie Review: An idyllic tropical paradise morphs into a tropical hell from which there seems no exit. Henry ( Ewan McGregor), his wife Maria ( Naomi Watts) and their three kids, Lucas ( Tom Holland), Thomas (Samuel Joslin) and Simon (Oaklee Pendergast) head out for their Christmas holidays to Thailand and plan to spend a few days soaking in the sun and sea air in Khao Lak - a peaceful and beautiful tropical resort. The morning after Christmas is serene and calm - the proverbial calm before the storm. There is no sense of cinematic build-up or foreboding regarding what is about to happen.

Then, with almost no warning, the tsunami pounds the land with gargantuan force and ushers in another phase of the film - wherein everything is quite literally turned upside down, shattered and devastated. This abrupt wrenching of gears will get you in the gut. It is relentless and visceral, with the disaster scenes being realistic and intense. Indeed, there is not a wasted second throughout the film, with the battering, surging swells of the ocean matched only by the surge of emotion in some scenes and composer Fernando Velazquez's music.

The movie gets a bit heavy-handed at times but it can be reasoned that this is Bayona's attempt at telling the story as realistically and graphically as possible by placing the viewer in the centre of it all. By being too focused on the family, there are moments when you might wonder about the thousands of other islanders whose own plight is not touched upon here.

By themselves, McGregor and Watts are, in a word, fantastic. The kids are very convincing - at times displaying great pluck and courage, heartrendingly vulnerable during other times. In their quest to sift out order from the chaos, they all manage to portray a range of feelings - fear, loss, love and the will to carry on - quite convincingly, without sounding fake or soppy. All in all, it's a powerful ode to the human will to live.

Note: You will not like this film if you don't like graphically-portrayed disaster survival stories.