Great effects but not recommended

Rating: 6/10 (19 August 2013)

Excellent special effects and some good acting in this film, but I can't recommend it. My basic complaint is slow periods (seemed like an hour was spend in that hospital where so little happened) and a strangely myopic story with the core family + a parade of unidentified strangers briefly encountered. I would have appreciated something more real, better geographic sense (how far is Phuket/airport, how far is the nearest town, what is adjacent to the hotel?) and some verbal relationship with the people around the family (at the pool, in the hotel, on the shuttle). Some have complained here about this film being a "typical Hollywood story" and I can only say, "I wish!" I would have loved to have some other people, say another family with children, introduced at the resort and carried through the story.
There were flaws in the story and periods where you shake your head and say, "That could never happen." An example was when the father abandons his 5 and 8 year old sons, on a truck, in a foreign country, after a natural disaster, in the dark-- NEVER would happen, not ever. So I looked online for the real story and it said that Alvarez left his 2 youngest children with someone at the resort. And there are other periods of poor direction where the viewer is needlessly confused. A last comment, the Thai nurse was just awful at acting, how did her work ever make the screen?
A replay of Maria going through the tsunami toward the end of the film was not appreciated.