The Impossible (2012)

Content by Tony Macklin. Originally published on December 18, 2012 @ tonymacklin.net.

The Impossible is like a big budget Lifetime saga. It's a mixture of screams and violins.

The movie is relentless punishment and relentless music. You'd better have a tolerance for both. One might leave the theater wondering how much can one be entertained by suffering?

The Impossible - based loosely on an actual event in 2004 - focuses on one family's dire experience when a colossal, violent tsunami destroys their vacation resort in Thailand.

It may make the movie more commercial that the parents are played by two gifted actors - Ewan McGregor and Naomi Watts - and the three sons have angelic faces.

Separated by the disaster, the wife (Watts) is badly hurt, and the father (McGregor) is missing. The children are shaken apart.

The Impossible, despite its scope, avoids nastiness. Man's inhumanity to man is limited to one man's refusal to share his cell phone.

In reality, the tsunami resulted in more than 225,000 fatalities in more than a dozen countries. In the movie, the bodies strewn across the obliterated landscape are not as multiple or grotesque as in reality.

One odd cameo is an appearance by veteran actress Geraldine Chaplin, as a woman who sits with one son in the dark looking at the night sky. She says, "Those stars burned out for a long, long time." It's "impossible" not to recognize the irony.

Spanish director Juan Antonio Bayona directs on a big scale. The musical score by Fernando Velazquez is off the scale.

The tsunami and its physical aftermath are grippingly impressive and starkly disturbing. But the spirituality is strained, and the plot is contrived.

There are a few "uplifting" moments. One is when the son Lucas (Tom Holland) runs about a hospital taking the names of other people's lost family members, and then tries to find them.

Guess what? He finds one - a needle in a tsunami.

It's that kind of movie.

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