The Impossible

Sad Professor

This is Juan Antonio Bayona’s next film, who directed The Orphanage. It stars Ewan McGregor and Naomi Watts and is about one family’s experience of the Indian Ocean tsunami in 2004. (Hopefully it’s better than Hereafter.) It’s got a pretty big budget and sounds like a disaster/survival film. It won’t be out until later in the year, but it’s already on my most anticipated list. Oh and don’t worry, the film is in English, but it’s Spanish produced so this dubbed trailer is all that’s currently available.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=izFdOXfixNc

Boo Radley

Sad Professor wrote: »

This is Juan Antonio Bayona’s next film, who directed The Orphanage. It stars Ewan McGregor and Naomi Watts and is about one family’s experience of the Indian Ocean tsunami in 2004. (Hopefully it’s better than Hereafter.) It’s got a pretty big budget and sounds like a disaster/survival film. It won’t be out until later in the year, but it’s already on my most anticipated list. Oh and don’t worry, the film is in English, but it’s Spanish produced so this dubbed trailer is all that’s currently available.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=izFdOXfixNc

Looks absolutely terrifying.

Sad Professor

New longer trailer (still in Spanish):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KEiOqE7gtvA

Thoms Yorkie Bars

Looks intense. Holy shít :eek:

Looking forward to that

Sad Professor

Full trailer:

Warning: it's one of those trailers that reveal the whole plot.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sI6rUOnOGuw

Looks good, but perhaps a bit conventional.

Bullseye1

I've felt like i have just seen the whole film with that trailer.

Sad Professor

I thought it was excellent. Extremely well crafted and acted survival film. Watts is superb as always and rightly receives top billing, though there are fine performances all round, especially from the eldest son (Tom Holland).

Many people will take issue with the story, which is contrived and sentimental. But when you go to see a film called "The Impossible" about a family of white people caught up in a natural disaster that killed 200 thousand people, most of them not white - you get what you pay for. This is a mainstream crowd-pleaser about familial love which contains some brilliantly intense and visceral scenes of natural disaster.

gustafo

Just watched this now what an excellent movie, the acting is superb especially from the kid actors, god it would put a tear in your eye what people went through when that disaster hit south east asia.

tunguska

The Tsunami recreation is amazing. Thats probably the best thing I can say about this film(Well Naomi watts is in it, not looking her usual hot self but shes still in my top 5). Its just too contrived. I know its a true story and all but still, they went way overboard on the sentimentality. The scene where the little blonde kid is reunited with his father is designed to pull at the heart strings, instead all I could think of was: This scene is designed to pull at the heartstrings. It was clinical/cynical. I went to see this with a big group of friends and not one person in the group liked it, they all thought it was mawkish and annoying. If I had seen this before the new year I'd have given it my worst film of 2012.

e_e

tunguska wrote: »

The Tsunami recreation is amazing. Thats probably the best thing I can say about this film(Well Naomi watts is in it, not looking her usual hot self but shes still in my top 5). Its just too contrived. I know its a true story and all but still, they went way overboard on the sentimentality. The scene where the little blonde kid is reunited with his father is designed to pull at the heart strings, instead all I could think of was: This scene is designed to pull at the heartstrings. It was clinical/cynical. I went to see this with a big group of friends and not one person in the group liked it, they all thought it was mawkish and annoying. If I had seen this before the new year I'd have given it my worst film of 2012.

This confirms my suspicions about it. I'll probably catch it further down the line but I am getting tired of these films exploiting tragic true stories in order to give a slight bit of uplift in the last few minutes. Maybe I'm wrong but I had to watch the trailer 3 times while seeing other films and it just bothered me.

nervous_twitch

I enjoyed it. I'm not sure what side of the fence I fall on with the accusations of overt sentimentality. It's not a general examination of life in and around the events of 2004 but the true story of a family who - against all odds - survived through the thick of it and found each other again. It was always going to be that kind of story, because that's just the way it happened.

I think the title insinuates this even. 'The Impossible' - the kind of narrative that only happens in fiction. I think if the film weren't based on true events it would be seen as a ludicrous yarn with a Hollywood ending - but again - the story adheres quite faithfully to Maria Belon's experience of the tsunami.

In saying that, I agree there were moments which were a bit too sweet, such as the aforementioned blond child (a pointless accessory to the plot?) and his father. I think some of this triteness was offset by the more graphic scenes (

I found Watts' injuries and that whole puking incident in the hospital quite bad

).

The tsunami itself was spectactular (doesn't sound right saying that). Visually, you got such a sense of how horrific/confusing it must have been for all of those poor folk who got caught up the initial wave. It reminded me very much of the same scene in Hereafter. Thankfully it wasn't done in that disaster-porn way, where the director is trying to make every awful eventuality come to pass. It made me actually really think about what happened that day; the first time I've probably done so since that year.

TL;DR: I quite liked it.

darced

This post has been deleted.

faceman

I though the film was good but I found the whole thing inappropriate. The focus was on a well off British family and completely ignores the plight of local people. In fact at times I felt it was pushing it in making out the local people (the villagers and hospital staff) were odd or incompetent. but that's just my opinion.

johnny_ultimate

Pretty much indifferent to it. Relatively well-made, although I thought the most powerful moment of all was the roar of the rushing waters on a black screen. Sentimental to a fault, no doubt, and scenes like the

tense hospital reunion

were too contrived. Still, engaging enough for its duration, well-acted and moderately sensitive. The soaring strings of the score were shockingly manipulative though.

The story being told is certainly one that justifies a cinematic telling, this and Argo to me suggest an urgent need for alternative perspectives in Hollywood cinema - not just white people triumphing in dangerous foreign lands. It's a loaded argument, and a troublesome one, but it's slightly disheartening that Hollywood superstars seem to be a prerequisite to getting films like this made. While I thought the film itself offered a reasonably well balanced portrayal of destruction and chaos through one family's eyes, to be the biggest disappointment came in the postscript - the family in question were actually Spanish. Perhaps its unreasonable to expect an expensive mainstream film through the eyes of a poor Thai family, but I'm disappointed a Spanish cast couldn't be utilised. When the film spends so much time emphasising its 'true story' status at the start, and the creatives & funding were predominantly Spanish (definitely the strangest funding structure I've seen for a high-profile film), the oddness of the casting is particularly emphasised.

nervous_twitch

johnny_ultimate wrote: »

I'm disappointed a Spanish cast couldn't be utilised.

I don't understand this complaint. Something similar going on with Cloud Atlas. Is the colour of the family (especially given the Belens were middle-upper class) not absolutely irrelevant? It's an English language film, so it makes sense that they should come from an English speaking country. Would it not be just as contrived to have Spanish actors speaking English? Unless you think it should have been done through Spanish with English subtitles; in which case, that's a whole other argument.

johnny_ultimate

nervous_twitch wrote: »

I don't understand this complaint. Something similar going on with Cloud Atlas. Is the colour of the family (especially given the Belens were middle-upper class) not absolutely irrelevant? It's an English language film, so it makes sense that they should come from an English speaking country. Would it not be just as contrived to have Spanish actors speaking English? Unless you think it should have been done through Spanish with English subtitles; in which case, that's a whole other argument.

I just think its extremely odd given the film's crew are predominantly Spanish and that it was almost completely funded from Spanish sources (Apaches Entertainment, Telecinco Cinema, Mediaset España, Canal+ España, Generalitat Valenciana, Institut Valencia de Cinematografia (IVAC), Instituto de la Cinematografía y de las Artes Audiovisuales (ICAA)). If it was produced in Hollywood, I wouldn't have as much of an issue with it - I don't think its all that valid complaint for Cloud Atlas, for example, and I have happily bought into English speaking actors playing non-English speaking characters (e.g. Valkyrie). But its just seems that for international commercial purposes, Hollywood stars (and there are plenty of well-established Spanish actors in Hollywood who could fit the bill) and English language are mandatory. Perhaps it was the directors decision, and that he didn't feel he'd get better than Watts, McGregor and the kids. If so, fair enough, that's a worthy artistic justification. But I did feel the decision was a very odd one, and not just because of skin-colour - narratively, for example, the restriction of Spanish language could have been a curious tool (the film occasionally shows the communication problems faced by non-English / non-Thai speaking characters, for example, which could have been intriguingly expanded upon if the main characters faced that problem to a greater degree).

Although I can not deny a hope that mainstream cinema represented a more diverse range of nationalities and people - more than just British and American protagonists.

Jonny7

So rich white people get their luggage wet, whilst surrounded by dying locals.. sounds impossible alright

zoobizoo

Found the film quite boring after the big wave scene and some of it quite laughable - especially the coincidences.

Couldn't figure out why they bothered giving Naomi an English accent though.

Hank Scorpio

****e imo, dunno how it got such good ratings...

Being a massive survival movie fan, I don't know this is classed as such, as more than half the movie is based in a hospital

paddyh117

This movie bored me!! Everyone I spoke to said how difficult to watch it was, and how horrific it was - It was very very average, apart from a couple of good scenes.

the clincher for me was the blatant product placement 5 minutes from the end - killed whatever sentimentality I had left

cassid

The little boy Daniel, I noticed the way, he gentled rubbed the female characters arm up and down, my 3 year old does that to me, brought a bit of a tear to my eye.
The one aspect of the story that bugged me was the father leaving the 2 young children with total strangers to go up a mountain, I wonder did he actually do that, because I would never leave them out of my sight.
I do wish the story would have focused more on local people.

expectationlost

its not just that it focused to much on rich white family but it focussed too much on the boy, and the relationships within the family, still was much better then i thought it would when i saw the trailer last year

Johnny31

some scenes were disturbing, but was good watch

branners69

This film was painful to watch, only because it was pure sh1te! I have no idea how this film gets 7.6 on IMDB. I would give it a 3, only because the wave was pretty cool, even if they had to show me twice! I suppose they wanted their value for money!

Avoid, avoid, avoid!

e_e

Yeah I really disliked this film. It turns a horrific event into a bad Spielberg film.

Preachy, condescending, manipulative and somewhat tasteless. I struggle to think of why it even exists.