The Impossible (2012)
Review of The Impossible / Lo imposible (2012), directed by J.A. Bayona
I find it so ironic when I saw this movie poster and then watched the film itself. The film poster I had seen was the one featuring the husband of the couple depicted. When this film doesn’t even focus on the husband for the vast majority of it. I guess men sell films, folks, even if our main character is the mother and, if we want a main male character, it’s his son Lucas. This is my opening and biggest complaint about the film, because it infuriates me how main female characters are shunted to the side like this. This mother is strong, dammit.
Anyways, I saw this film because I was bored on a Tuesday morning. I’ve been on this strange kick where I watch movies about real people and events, which this film is about a woman whose family survived the 2003 tsunami. And, of course, that is what this movie is about. With some different information swapped in (e.g. this is a completely British family instead of a British one), the woman who actually survived this was consulted for the making of the film.
Let’s dive into this review, shall we?
Content
Another small tidbit before I get into the meat of this review. I knew the son, Lucas, looked and sounded extremely familiar. It took me until the last five minutes, literally right before the credits, to realize that it was fetus Tom Holland.
I was so confused throughout trying to figure out who the kid was until suddenly it just clicked. Apparently this was his first feature film, which, at the tender age of twelve years old, he did an awesome job in. The bloke had a knack for acting from the beginning it seems.
The beginning of this movie is the calm before the storm. Naturally, before a once-in-a-lifetime major tsunami sweeps them all away, the wife and husband get into a fight about jobs. As he gets into the pool and plays with his sons, there’s an odd sense of foreboding.
The air is too still, the birds fleeing upwards and in the opposite direction. And then the tidal wave sweeps them all away. The heavily injured wife, Maria, finds her son Lucas in the tide and they manage to find high ground.
Maria is in extremely bad shape; she has chest wounds and a chunk of her leg is straight up falling off. These injuries look really gross on screen, even though we as viewers know they’re fake.
Lucas is then in charge of taking care of his lowkey dying mother and a random small child they find named Daniel when Thai villagers rescue them, beginning this journey of survival and attempting to find out what happened to the rest of their family.
It’s a really emotional film when you think about it, especially when you realize that this this was a real event. So many people died, whether they be locals of the islands impacted by the tsunami, and a bunch of random tourists got caught up in this. That’s a nightmare scenario to go on vacation and experience this.
It’s a survival movie at the end of the day, since we don’t actually learn anything about the characters depicted within it. We know Maria is a doctor and vaguely about Henry’s, her husband’s, job, but besides they who are they really? You’re not going to get that answer in this film.
But after the sequence of being rushed by the flood of water, the movie tends to lose its steam. I thought depicting the Thai villagers as kind as they do was an important thing to incorporate, because I imagine many Western narratives would naturally just knock off the kindness of the local people and leave it at that. But once we get to the hospital, it becomes a routine of Maria sitting in bed and nearly dying while Lucas worries about her.
Overall Thoughts
It’s a good film if you want to cry. I think incorporating characters outside of the family was a good touch because it touches on the fact that so many people were affected by the disaster, rather than just focus on this single family.
The ending had me slightly questioning things, it seems a bit too clean and random of an ending, but it is what it is.
The acting was fairly solid from Naomi Watts and Tom Holland, who we see the most of in this film, and, I will admit, the film had me shedding a few tears by the end. It’s an important film that depicts a real story in which so many people died during. We don’t see many of the deaths on-screen, but they’re there, lurking in the foreground. And that’s what makes it so much more real.
