Surprisingly good

Rating: 8/10 (1 August 2013)

For some reason I really wanted to dislike this movie. Exploiting a natural disaster to make a story with a happy ending. I'd heard good things about it though so I watched it.
Easy to be cynical or picky about something like this. If you're going to make a Hollywood movie about something so huge and sensitive that really happened, you're surely going to put a lot of noses out of joint and get a lot of flak whatever choices you make.
I too was slightly perplexed when I realised the family whose experience this story was based on was Spanish. I hate it when they mess with the details in true stories, yet I've come to accept that's how movies work. Besides, if the popular account is to be believed then it turns out the real Maria had a hand in choosing Naomi Watts for the part. The rest, I would imagine, is the studio trying to increase box office sales by appealing to a wider audience.
The only thing that bothered me slightly was how it focused on the tourists' plight while seemingly ignoring the plight of the indigenous population. Then I remembered I was watching a movie, not a documentary so they either make it about the one thing or the other. Lets face it if they did make a movie about the plight of the indigenous population, it would lose box office sales. Sad but true.
I do honestly think there's a danger of over-sentimentalising real life tragedies on the cinema screen. Great for making people weep en masse, but somehow surely missing the bigger picture. But if it rains you get wet, and if you go to the movies, you get sentimental half-truths with orchestral scores.
So all the factual hang-ups, moral implications and story choices aside, I think this was a very well acted film which makes you wonder what it would be like for you and your family to be caught in such a terrible event.
Naomi Watts and Ewan McGregor were good as the parents. I guess Watts got the best screen time, but I thought McGregor put in one of his better performances of late. Particularly good when he was calling home.
The children were pretty good for children, especially the older boy.
It made me laugh when somebody complained about seeing a breast in this movie. My god - when you consider what it must have really been like there, and the horrific sights that would've littered the landscape, you get upset about a part of the human body being exposed? Really? What kind of reality do these people live in?
I don't know how they recreated some of the scenes but I thought they did an amazing job. Co-ordinating all those extras must've been hell. That was the best aspect of the movie for me - how convincing some of the settings were.
It all gets highly emotive surrounding the separated family, and there are some pretty gory scenes too so watch it with a box of Kleenex and a blindfold handy.
An all-round well-polished, annoyingly good(for some reason!), must-see movie. I wouldn't have thought you'd want to let kids less than 11 watch it, but barring that, good for the family - because that's what it's all about.