Review: The Impossible

Review: The Impossible

You'll never look at the ocean the same way again.

See, simply watching a movie is fine, but to be hit hard by it and to still be considering its impact hours later shows a truly remarkable feat of film-making. Compelling, horrific and beautiful all at the same time, The Impossible is a heartbreaking true story of one family's effort to reach each other in the midst of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. 

Swept away whilst on holiday, Henry Bennett (Ewan McGregor), his wife Maria (Naomi Watts) and their sons Lucas (Tom Holland), Simon (Oaklee Pendergast) and Thomas (Samuel Joslin) find themselves far apart when the water clears. Unsure if their kin are alive or dead, they set out to find one another in the midst of one of the worst natural disasters of all time. Split into two groups - Maria and Lucas together, Henry taking care of Simon and Thomas - they must find shelter, help and most importantly each other.

At its core, it's a disaster movie - but at its heart, it's a tragedy. The Impossible is a far cry from the superficial CGI fuelled fiasco of, say, 2012 or The Day After Tomorrow. In most movies, surviving the disaster would be enough. In The Impossible, surviving is only the first step - reuniting with those you love is the finish line. By zeroing in on a tight group of characters rather than skimming over an ensemble cast, director Juan Antonio Bayona succeeds in adding a hugely emotional punch to the narrative, a punch which is helped by an incredible mise en scene - we'll never know what it was like to experience that horrific event, but this is as close as we're going to get. The visuals are perfect on every level.

Yet, sometimes they take the time to show off so much that the narrative frustratingly slows down. It's a walloping punch of realism to see the gore, the cuts and the bruises that the characters sustain, but sometimes it feels as though Bayona is trying to be too real. We don't need to watch a 10 minute scene of people puking up blood to establish that this is horrific - we're intelligent enough to work it out for ourselves, and the various dead bodies and slow-mo scenes of kids being dragged through mud has already given us plenty of evidence. The shock value of seeing some blood or horrific wound wears thin pretty quickly.

What shows off effortlessly, however, is the talent of the cast. Ewan McGregor and Naomi Watts pull on the heartstrings by giving it everything they've got, particularly in one harrowing scene where Henry is forced to phone his wife's father and explain that he can't find the man's daughter. This reviewer may have had something in his eye at one point.

The real star of the show is young Tom Holland, bursting out of the screen in a breakthrough performance as Lucas, the eldest child who finds himself forced to become a man in the wake of the disaster. It could have went wrong, but luckily Holland holds the story together and stops it from becoming a hopeless tale of woe, dancing with emotions effortlessly. He carries the audience and he is our voice throughout the film.

The climax itself could have been a complete mess, and in some respects it is if you have a particular dislike for metaphors, yet Bayona is subtle, driving home the fact that while the movie may be over for us, the horrific nightmare will never leave the hearts and minds of those who were there.

Summary

Like most real-life disaster movies, The Impossible suffers from having a "feel-good", hopeful vibe towards its goal despite the extreme loss of life. That said, it's a visual achievement on every level, be it the prosthetics or the scenery, and the tale is given a massive emotional weight by the lead cast, particularly McGregor and newcomer Holland. A little too much focus on the "realistic" gore takes away from the experience, but overall The Impossible is an affecting, true to life drama with a carefully evaluated core and spot-on casting. You'll be crying oceans of your own.

8/10 - Great

See it if you liked: Titanic (1997), Armageddon (1998), The Road (2009)