Not just a disaster flick

Rating: 8/10 (18 February 2013)

It's psychologically difficult to imagine the scale not just of the 2004 tsunami itself, but of the human suffering it caused. The only way to grasp it really is to focus on individual stories (remembering that millions of people each have a similar story).
In this movie we follow what happened to an ordinary (British?) family, Maria, Henry and their three young sons. The depiction of the tsunami not long after the start is harrowing and at times difficult to watch. You cannot help but wonder how on earth they could have filmed those scenes (or created them using computer graphics, if that's what it was).
Fortunately this is an intelligent, sensitive film that does not attempt to recast these events as a cheesy Hollywood disaster film.
For the rest of the movie, we follow the family members to see whether they have all survived and, if so, whether they can find each other in the post-disaster confusion that followed.
The performances here were all first rate. Naomi Watts and Ewan McGregor are fine actors, and they deliver worthy performances in this film. The scene in which Ewan McGregor breaks down while calling his family moved me to tears. Some superb acting there. Tom Holland also shows much promise as a young actor.
If this movie has a fault, it's in its unrelenting tugging at the heart strings. "Suffering porn" and "shamless tear-jerking" were the phrases that came to mind while I was watching parts of it, although in hindsight perhaps that is quite unfair. The director had to walk a fine line in creating a film like this. After all, a quarter million people died, and many, many others had far more devastating experiences than this family.
The film succeeds magnificently in showing us a little what it must have been like to live through this tragedy. (However, I haven't read the other reviews so I don't know if the survivors feel that way about the film.) Ultimately, this is not so much a story about the tsunami as a story about a family's love for each other.