The Impossible

This movie is filmed very well. It looks good.
And it is very sad. Well actually, it's heartbreaking.
But that's it.

It's based on a family who go to Thailand for Christmas in 2004 and their struggle to survive and find each other after the devastating Tsunami hits.

Naomi Watts has been nominated for an Oscar for this performance but she doesn't really do anything. At the start she smiles and then she screams and cries and is in a lot of pain. Otherwise she doesn't do all that much. I didn't really think that this was a particularly breath taking performance. I will say that to me, it seems that when acting, being in pain would be easier than acting other things. But I am not an actor so maybe I am wrong. Her character doesn't change or go through any sort of character development and she isn't really in it all that much compared to her movie son, Lucas (Tom Holland). I just wasn't taken by her performance. I wasn't a huge Naomi Watts fan before I saw this and I wanted this movie to make me like her more but that didn't happen. 

Ewan McGregor is good although maybe a little wasted in this role. I mean think back to Danny Boyle's Trainspotting. Ewan was awesome in that. Here he just seems very restrained and in my opinion, his character is pretty silly sometimes. No common sense.

But a saving grace for this movie is the kids, the two younger sons, Thomas and Simon (Samuel Joslin and Oaklee Pendergast). They are so adorable and that would have been enough but they are also really good actors. This movie is an achievement for them as it is so heavy emotionally and they are so little. And Tom Holland does well. He has most of the movie riding on him and many emotional scenes but he does very well for someone so young.

But this wasn't enough to sell this movie for me. There was something about this movie that was very off-putting. From when I saw the trailer I just shuddered and the shudder continued. It just had a dirty feeling to it and I couldn't shake it. Here is this horrific disaster where many people lost their lives and their families. This event is something that people are never going to forget and here is Hollywood putting these perfect Hollywood faces on it and making a money grubbing movie about it. I feel like they are taking this away from the people who suffered through this event.

It may be based on a true story about a Spanish family but I don't see why (apart from to make money) they have to put these rich, white faces on it. It may make people understand the horrific circumstances of it all better but I still feel that it is a little culturally ignorant or that it ignored too many other stories. To be honest, I was more interested in the stories of people around this family. I wanted to know and learn about more families and what they went through rather than this one.

I remember when this Tsunami hit. I was in England with my family. I was 11. One of the only reasons I remember it was partly because it was all the news could talk about but more because I remember coming out of seeing Mary Poppins at the theatre and they had all these donations buckets. I was just excited about putting money in a bucket. I didn't understand the severity of it at all. And this movie did make me want to go back and tell 11 year old me to put more money in that bucket, even though I was young and in a foreign country and any money I had wasn't my own but my mothers.

I have heard that Hoyts is donating $1 of every ticket sold to see The Impossible to UNICEF Australia. This is only one cinema chain across Australia and only $1. I think that this movie should be donating most of it's profits to organisations like UNICEF and disaster recovery across the world. That might make me like this movie better.

Also, the title. I mean, really?