tourists, stay home?

Rating: 7/10 (2 January 2013)

A good catastrophe story, not a lot more. A happy family with a typical irritating adolescent vs. good compassive mother conflict structure goes to retrieve the exotic and is almost destroyed by the real exotic. And that means a big adventure centered around a white family in a foreign country that simply doesn't appears to exist in the drama construction. Okay, it's an adventure that drags everyone in a breathless adrenaline exercise until when the title of the movie becomes justified. It seems that the not-so-hidden message is something like "Beware tourists. Stay close to your homelands". The film is well done narratively, attractive on the whole technological project - what means trivia and a lot of blingblings for cinephiles to quarrel about. With some good camera work, etc., etc., but all that just to tell Hollywood that other cinema schools can tell a good story with competence. What strikes me the most in the whole work is that it must have the (good) intention to preserve tourism but openly spouses manicheism to the point of preserving Nokia in such a catastrophe - and in that sense, it falls into old good Hollywood clichés. A must see, anyway. The watcher gets entertained all the time - but that's it. Watching tourist's disgraces is always good, even if spurious, entertainment. Just another question: local people didn't die, right? (THAT impression that the film conveys is the real catastrophe. Eurocentrism. Not the tsunami. At all).