December 2 0 0 4. Maria Bennett travels with her husband Henry and three children Lucas, Simon and Thomas to Khao Lak, Thailand, for a vacation. They enjoy their stay at the hotel and spend the Christmas there. On 26 December, the Indian Ocean earthquake causes a tsunami which reaches the shore and sweeps away the hotel and the guests. Badly wounded, Maria is able to find Lucas and a boy, Daniel, and climb up a tree in case of another tsunami. Locals find them and transport them to a hospital. Henry finds that his mother's bed is taken over by another patient, and cannot find her, until the staff leads him to her, who has undergone surgery, but is stable. Henry, Simon and Thomas also survived, and manage to find and reunite with Maria and Lucas in the hospital. They are then evacuated to Singapore.
One of the first film depictions of the catastrophic 2 0 0 4 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami which killed 228,000 people along the wider area of the Bay of Bengal, based on the real-life experiences of survivor Maria Belon, "The Impossible" is an intense, terrifying and strong blend of disaster and survival film. The director J. A. Bayona takes care of the authenticity, allowing for the story to contemplate about the notions of fragility of life under threat from random disasters of the harsh, cruel universe, whereas the leading actress Naomi Watts is excellent as Maria. The film does not waste time—the tsunami occurs already 14 minutes into the film, and this segment is its most impressive accomplishment: tourists are happily walking along the swimming pool, when all of a sudden Maria's paper is carried away by the wind and stops at a glass wall, as she and others turn around to randomly see palm trees falling down along the horizon. Cue to a random 12 ft tall wave of dirty, brown water which simply sweeps everything in sight, from tourists to the hotel building. It all just happens in 20 seconds, and they simply don't have time to react at all. Maria hangs on to a tree, and the water stream is all around her, she let's go to try to swim after her son Lucas, but she is pierced when she is carried by the water into a random tree branch. This whole sequence is incredible and one wonders how they managed to film it. The rest of the film is the aftermath segment, which encompasses the remaining 2/3 of "The Impossible's" running time, but it is of lesser intensity and falters a bit in interest. Having Maria and Lucas wait at the hospital is simply not that engaging, which is why the director even uses the cliche of father Henry almost not finding Maria in her hospital bed and is just about to leave in the truck when something happens, which is banal. The storyline clearly needed some better written dialogue or cinematic inspiration for support in this post-tsunami segment. Nonetheless, "The Impossible" is a valuable depiction of the disaster, showing how it looked like and what its effects were.
Grade:+++
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