Harrowing and emotional experience

Rating: 8/10 (29 January 2013)

After the tsunami hits in this true story, you really get a feel for the aftermath...I love the aesthetic of the holiday resort...it just looks really horrible and the cast and extras look suitably ragged. The special effects and effects are just great. In Hollywood movies when you saw a tsunami, it would be towering over a skyscraper, which just looked incredible. Seeing the news footage of the tsunami at the time, it was a different kettle of fish, but no less bleak. "The impossible" really captures that moment and what happens afterwards.
In one of the news stories I read about the even, it was mentioned that tourists on the beach noticed how far the tide was out before the tsunami hit. That strikes me as being invaluable information, turning a "That's weird!" observation into - hopefully - a realisation that you need to run to the hills, so to speak, to save your life. However, this bit of crucial information is not mentioned in the movie, which I do feel was a pity...it could have been introduced somehow.
Anyway, this movie is about one family's (the Bennetts) experiences of the tsunami and the aftermath...not knowing if they would live through the initial surge, worrying about further surges, and wondering if/how many of their immediate family have died in the initial surge.
There are many scenes which establish how nice and good this family but the worth of this movie is in how raw emotion moves you. Naomi Watts as Maria, the mother of 3 young boys does just that, and is deserving of her acting award nominations. The moments where she does make you feel her agony deserves recognition...perhaps even winning any such awards. Ewan McGregor as Henry, the father also has one powerful scene. The one bum note in this move for me was where Henry came across as the 'star' of the movie, instead of just being someone in the same boat as everyone else...I mean how the non-central characters got involved in his story. It just rang false to me...because his plight was no more or less important than anyone else's. Tom Holland has the eldest Bennett boy also has some very good scenes where he powerfully conveys emotion. I'm not sure that the performances are of a consistently high quality, but when they hit those heights, Naomi, Ewan and Tom certainly deserve recognition for their acting. They truly moved me.
This movie is a good candidate for recognition in the fields of acting and special effects and effects, costume and the like. There are some scenes of injuries suffered in the tsunami which are definitely not for the squeamish though.
Have noticed at least one professional reviewer mark the movie down for substituting a white, Anglo family for the Spanish family this movie was based on. That seems really pedantic to me. The credits to demonstrate a very big Spanish role in the making of this movie, so it looks like a conscious decision to maximise the audience for the story in the West, and a photo of the actual family is shown at the end.
If I was to quibble, the start of the movie emphasises the "true story" aspect of this movie whilst it does have some very Hollywood like coincidences which didn't seem plausible. Maybe such coincidences did actually happen to the family, but in the movie it just seemed contrived...but not in a way which devalued the experience.
The end credits lists "tea boys" in the crew...that must be a first, surely? Pity I missed the person who "always says..."...not sure if that was sourced from the original family or not...they do get mentioned a bit.