Mediocre disaster movie

Rating: 5/10 (3 January 2013)

I was cautiously excited the moment I learned that the director of the movie, Bayona, is also the director of the lovely sad horror movie 'The Orphanage'. Still, shooting a disaster movie has a number of drawbacks -hence the caution-. 1) developing a character without resorting to clichés, such as the scared man/woman turning resilient, broken couple who rediscover each other, etc. 2) relying on too much on the technique -everyone wants to shoot a lovely disaster scene, which often shadows the movie itself- 3) finding an original way to tell the story.
Since the work is based on a true story, Bayona has an excuse on narrative issues. But he doesn't have any excuses on a lot of mistakes:
1. No character development: We barely learn anything about our typical white family before the tsunami hits. Actually, it makes sense; because our family is so ordinary, so typical white; that developing a character out of them is almost impossible. Hence, he lets the tsunami roll as early as possible.
2. Inconclusive attempts: Bayona tries to create small stories, but almost all of them fails miserably. In the early stages, we catch our adolescent male protagonist looking at her mother's breast with mixed feelings. Only natural if you are adolescent, but Bayona doesn't follow the trail; he leaves it there. Why did you start it in the first place then?
Also, we see the mom reading Conrad -most probably "The Heart of Darkness"- in the plane on their way to Thailand. Nice touch to stress the white - indigenous tension, and nice referral to Peter Jackson's "King Kong". Nevertheless, if you imply such a tension, you have to give the audience the follow-up your promise, which Bayona fails to do so. A careful eye will observe two-three other subtexts which Bayona put forward to make his story more interesting, but none goes anywhere. I have a feeling that the stories were most probably lost on the editing table. Or worse: Bayona wants to show off, "Look, I know Conrad! I even read a couple of works on post-colonial studies!"
3. I'm not even mentioning the lack of subtleties in the movie: the indigenous dragging the mom in spite of her leg wound, and the son not preventing it, etc.
Avid movie lovers know the difference between a 'character' and a 'type'. This movie doesn't have a single character; and this would have worked if Bayona tried to create a distance between the victimised typical white family and the audience. But you cannot prevent your audience to create an emotional attachment with the victims, and as a matter of fact, we can't see any traces of Bayona making an effort on that, either. For instance, there is no side-story that would have made the deeper. Instead, all the tragedy of the 'else', apart from a couple of white side-kicks who happen to have the chance to bump into our white protagonists, is reduced into general "Oh, see how dramatic it is!" shots.
All in all, this movie is full of intellectual inconsistencies and half-spent efforts; which drags it into the league of mediocre and typical disaster movies. Makes me think that the real magic in "the Orphanage" was not director Bayona, but the executive producer, known by the name, Guillermo del Toro.