Expertly crafted, phenomenally acted

Rating: 8/10 (31 December 2012)

Not a lot of story here: tsunami hits, family is divided, members are hurt but try to find each other in the utter chaos. Still it's able to put you right there in the horror with two easy to empathize leads and a handful of bafflingly wonderful child actors.
You expect this kind of extra-impressive acting from the two old pros, Naomi Watts and Ewan McGregor, but these new kids, especially Tom Holland plying their son Lucas, are at least as effective. Never caught the slightest false move on any of them. Now how is that possible? They've certainly never had to live through anything quite as horrific and yet you would swear they have.
Somehow the tsunami itself looks real as does the landscape in its aftermath. We've just spent some time on a beach on vacation and this movie brought it all back. Even the family's dirty and disheveled state looked right in every way.
Quibbles might include some unnecessary near misses as they searched for each other and what might have been an overblown rendition of one lead's physical state, but I could just as easily believe this was the way they remembered or lived it.