I've been seeing the trailer for this for months and it finally came to town, so we went. Like most movie fans, I've seen plenty of disaster flix over the years, like 2012, Deep Impact, Godzilla, The Day After Tomorrow, The Core, The Road, etc and most of them are fairly silly, loud entertainment where the world is saved by teenagers with hot rods or scientists with theories or whatever contrived device the writers come up with. One exception, of course, is The Road, possibly the most depressing movie ever made. The Impossible isn't on the scale of disaster of The Road (which seems to be the end of it all), but for the characters in the movie, as well as countless thousands in real life, the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami was as close as you can get to the end of their part of the world.
In this movie, a British family is vacationing in Thailand when the impossible happens. The family is separated, injured and and spends the rest of the movie trying to survive and find each other. Unlike most disaster movies, this is not light entertainment but high drama and terrible tragedy. The tsunami and its aftermath are rendered in grisly detail with floating, bloated bodies, muddy wreckage, dead animals and nearly complete destruction. It's not for the faint hearted.
Ewan McGregor as the father and Naomi Watts as the critically injured wife, trying to hang onto their kids and find each other are excellent at communicating visceral fear and complete powerlessness. A large and believable cast of Thai actors trying to deal with the ugly and confusing aftermath of the disaster seem almost documentary in their believability. There's a rather odd, short cameo by Geraldine Chaplin as an old lady waiting to be evacuated along with the other surviving European tourists (who pack into Thai resorts in winter and were right on the beach when the surge hit). There are some weaknesses (especially McGregor's make up, where blood smears persist until the end of the movie when they are evacuated), but, in general, it's an excellent but very upsetting movie. The mixed audience of hipsters, ironic art students and older filmies like me was stone quiet until the end of the movie and seemed to walk out feeling relieved to be on high ground. It's not easy entertainment, but this English language Spanish production is excellent and well worth seeing if you can take it. It's a fictionalized true story and the real family is pictured at the end.
