Accurate depiction of disaster experience

Rating: 6/10 (26 January 2014)

Tom Holland's performance carried the film for me. I didn't love the script in some of its details, and I thought the reunion moments and some of the emotionality after that was maudlin rather than moving.
In certain other ways I was impressed. I've read a good deal on the psychology of disaster and experienced one major one myself, and the film does a good job of showing how chaotic things can be and how poor human decisions can be at such times. (Sending your tiny kids off with strangers in a foreign country while you set yourself a task that will get accomplished somehow later on even if you keep your kids? A really stupid thing to do, and a really normal human response in a disaster.) The shutting off of sound at times they are tossed around in the water early on is also something that happens (sometimes people go temporarily blind, too.) While surely some film viewers will say "I would do better than this," they're mostly wrong--some people are great in disasters, but if you are or not is to a great extent hard-wiring, if you have certain brain structures or not, and not under your willful control. Training can help maximize performance, too, but who could train for this? Absent tsunami warning sirens, you're at the mercy of luck and how well your brain automatically works. Lucas--the character and perhaps the boy in real life--has the optimum response, while the adults here are nearer average. Did the filmmakers trust the reports of the survivors or read extensively to get this information? However they came to it, I appreciated seeing a truthful depiction.
Still, the film seemed pretty average to me overall. I'd never watch it a second time, but I don't resent the 90 minutes I spent with it.