The Impossible Review

Well that title sounds interesting. Is this review impossible? If it is, I am doing it anyways and that makes me pretty legit. I'm like Ender or something. No, in complete seriousness, with this blog post I am reviewing the movie called The Impossible, but I am sure you already knew that. I just decided to have a little fun with it. If you have never heard of The Impossible, it is a fairly new movie. Yes, it has technically been out since December 21st, but camped out in only 15 theaters for all of December. Just after New Years it jumped up to 500 theaters and the second weekend in January it barely qualified for a nationwide release with 800 theaters. So it's not everywhere right now, but it's in enough places for you to find a local theater near you to check out. The movie is about the Tsunami in southeast Asia in 2004, telling the true story of a family who got trapped in it. And oh my goodness, it is quite the theatrical experience. Queezy stomachs beware and emotional movie goers make sure you have your box of tissues ready.

The biggest thing I took from this movie was that nature at times is a cold-hearted, cruel monster. We hear about natural disasters all the time and we always feel bad for them, but we often don't fully understand the term natural disaster, emphasizing the word disaster, until we have experienced one ourselves. This movie does a fantastic job of putting you right in the middle of a natural disaster, namely one of the worst natural disasters the world has experienced in our lifetime anyways. It was the day after Christmas in 2004 when an underwater earthquake of a magnitude of 9.3 hit. This earthquake was the biggest earthquake in the past 40 years and the second largest in recorded history. The earthquake set off a huge tsunami that killed an estimated 230,000 people. Going into this movie, I knew that it was going to be about this event, but what caught me off guard was the high level of realism that came with it. It was very graphic and very PG-13. The scene when the tsunami hit was very intense as was the scenes where the main family we followed were getting carried away, thrown around, and bloodied up by this disaster. And as hard as that was, the aftermath was equally as hard if not more as we saw broken up and bloodied bodies every scattered among the dead. Then we spent a good majority of the movie in a third-world hospital setting that was scattered with injured people. Yes, this is very much an adult film that is probably really close to an R-rating. Keep young children far away from it. There was even a brief half second where Naomi Watts' character realizes that her shirt got half ripped off by the tsunami. It's not sexual, but yet a half second of nudity nonetheless that I didn't appreciate, so beware of that.

Let's walk away from the tragic aspect of the movie to different things. The movie starred Naomi Watts and Ewan McGregor. Now those two have been around the movie scene recently, but this is the first time that I personally have seen either one in a movie, so that was refreshing for me. And let me give a ton of praise to both of them. They both did a fantastic job. Now Naomi Watts was the one that got an Oscar nomination for her performance and she definitely deserved every bit of that nomination. I don't know if she will actually win the award because there are some pretty solid candidates for the Best Actress award this year, but she would definitely get my vote. Ewan McGregor I think did a good enough job to get a nomination, but the Best Actor category this year is even stiffer competition than the ladies, so it would be hard to point at one of the nominees to replace with Ewan. But in addition to Ewan and Naomi, the rest of the cast did a great job and I especially liked the three kids, the oldest kid Lucas (Tom Holland) being my favorite. The cinematography in the movie was fantastic, especially when it came to the tsunami scene. And the music really added a lot to the movie, both when it was present and when it was absent. What I mean by that is that there were certain scenes where the music was playing, but immediately went silent when the movie cut to being underwater. It really felt like you were underwater with the victims.

Overall, I didn't have a ton to complain about when it came to this movie. It truly was an excellent movie that portrayed the events of this tragic tsunami very well. It's also an inspiring story as far as the family goes. I won't say much about what specifically happens to them as that will take away the element of surprise, but it is based on an actual family and if you stay to the end of the credits, you will get a thank you note/poem from one of the family members thanking the makers of this movie for telling their story. But with that said, given the subject matter of this movie, it is one that despite the praise I have for it, I really only need to see it that once, if that makes any sense. But I will still give it a strong 9 out of 10.