The Impossible

The Impossible (2012) ***

When a party of cheerful seaside family vacationers to Thailand—including Maria (Naomi Watts), Henry (Ewan McGregor) and the couple’s three young boys—set loose a flurry of Chinese lanterns into the night sky early in “The Impossible,” a young character notices one of the glowing, helium-filled balloons gently drifting in the opposite direction strangely out of sync with the pattern of the others. Whether mere coincidence or not, it’s a subtle note of discord and the closest we get to an eerie premonition of doom.

The next day, a massive tidal wave roars ashore and tears apart everything in its path, leaving the idyllic ocean resort reduced to a wasteland of splintered trees, shredded buildings and dead bodies. For the few who survive, including the main characters, the intense hours ahead are filled with confusion, separation, screams of pain and cries of suffering.

Indeed, “The Impossible” recalls the aftermath of the cataclysmic tsunami that struck East Asia after a record-setting earthquake rocked the Indian Ocean on December 26, 2004. It was one of the deadliest natural disasters in history, destroying swaths of land and claiming over 230,000 lives. The story of Maria and her family is based on true events and brought to the screen here by writer Sergio G. Sanchez and director J.A. Bayona. It’s certainly an amazing, highly compelling tale of courage, survival, selfless love and profound humanity.

What the movie lacks is a strong visual command. While it’s true that the imagery of the crashing wave is convincing and technically savvy, Bayona misses a chance to capitalize on the suspense that grows just before the wave hits when things started looking ominous and disturbing—the way the tide suddenly shifted dramatically and shallow fringes of the ocean opened up yawning holes of seabed. With the absence of a warning system at the time of the disaster, it was documented that some locals hopelessly tried to warn people that something was terribly amiss—that there was something wrong with the water.

But Bayona’s camera, unfortunately, never explores any of these details. Perhaps the idea was to keep the exposition as sparse as possible in order to preserve the immediacy of the event or to prevent the film from inching too close to wonky scientific territory, but regardless, the resulting minimalism is stylistically limiting and—especially with all the digital tools of contemporary cinema at the filmmaker’s disposal—a bit disappointing.

Still, though not a visual triumph, “The Impossible” is an emotional one. Most of the film revolves around the time after the disaster, when Maria sustains serious injuries after being battered and whipped by the fierce energy of the waves. After some frenetic moments of uncertainty, she is able to locate her eldest son, Lucas, who somehow manages to emerge from the wreckage with only bruises.

The rest of their family is presumed dead as they navigate waist-deep water in search of safety. At one point still early in the film, Maria hears a distant cry and persuades her son to turn around. Someone, somewhere, is alive and needs help. “If it’s the last thing we ever do,” she says softly against his shouts of protestation. They still have a long, dangerous journey to safety, but then they find a small boy, alone and frightened, and end up rescuing him. It’s a genuinely moving moment that rises above maudlin because it’s a sincere act of pure, ordinary decency that, thematically, suggests being human is more powerful than even the most brutal forces of nature. It’s also what true heroism is all about.