The Impossible Review

Tasteless? Sort of, but only as a function of narrative veracity. Or something.  Spoilers.

 

This guy does not appear in the film

The Impossible is a film based on a true story about the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami, as seen through the eyes of one western family on holiday in Khao Lak, Thailand. The original Spanish family have been racebended to a more box office-palatable English / Scottish group, with the primary cast being Ewan Macgregor, Naomi Watts, and Tom Holland (who appears to be a young clone of Jamie Bell).

The early parts of the film are handled in a workmanlike, even predictable manner. We’re introduced to the family on the plane, they arrive in the resort, shots of the placid ocean are given menacing, Jaws-esque music.

When the wave itself actually hits, it’s a whole different ball game. There’s very little build up, no shots of it rushing across the beach. A blender in the hotel dies, some trees in the background fall, and suddenly a wall of water smashes into the protagonists  and everyone around them.

The violence of the wave itself is shockingly realistic, and preconceptions of simply having to fight against a surge of clean seawater are quickly smashed. It is filthy brown, and filled with branches and debris which bludgeon and tear at its victims as it tosses them around like a washing mashine.When it is eventually over, the survivors must find their way back to each other through the shattered remnants of the Thai coastline.

Much has been made of the ethnic bias of the film, and it is true that most of the characters are white, and/or western. The Thai people do appear, but only generally as background, or plot devices to ferry the main characters from one section to another. Few of them are even seen dead, injured or suffering. Given the massive casualties suffered by the Thai people, it seems callous at worst and manipulative at best. But, is it actually that unlikely?

Here is where the film’s greatest selling point (that it is “true”) starts to become its own undoing. From the perspective of a foreigner in a strange land, the people around just can’t have that much bearing on your own story. You can’t converse with them, and interactions must be fairly limited, particularly if there are also a group around you which speak your lingo. You will just naturally gravitate to them. Similarly, in the heart of Khao Lak, there probably were a lot more tourists around the area than there were native Thais. It’s entirely possible that the ethnocentric bias is simply a side effect of having the perspective coming from a relatively wealthy, prosperous western family on holiday. Adding more Thai into the narrative may, oddly enough, have detracted from its veracity. It might have made a better or at least more ethnically tasteful film, but would it have been a "truthful" one?

The Impossible often feels a little uncomfortable in its own skin. Ostensibly a disaster movie, its antecedents are closer to the flicks where an individual fights through personal horror and suffering to salvation, such as Touching The Void and 127 Hours (or to go a bit further afield, The Passion of the Christ or even Saw). A salient difference is that Watts, as the primary sufferer, is a woman, and it’s one which director Juan Antonio Bayona is clearly aware of. A soft-focus shot of Watts pulling on her bikini early on in the film teases a glimpse of nipple, and is contrasted later on with a sudden, unexpected full on shot of her breast with a vicious slash across it. "You wanted to see tits? Well, here you go!" 

Any opportunity to show its characters (and particularly Watts) in pain is jumped on, with plenty of time spent with her screaming as she’s dragged across bamboo with an injured leg or trying to force herself to climb a tree. Macgregor by contrast gets off relatively lightly, but there’s still one unintentionally comical scene where he tries to climb a chair which collapses underneath him with an exaggerated grisly crack, and he screams like someone just stabbed him. 

The other difference between The Impossible  and 127 Voids is that in those films, the protagonist struggled against near-impossible odds with only supreme willpower to rely on. The main ability of the Impossible family is given away by the title – they are just super goddamn lucky. Their survival isn’t really due to any particular efforts on their parts, but on a confluence of bizarre chances.

Thus, as a disaster film, it focuses too much on the trials and tribulations of one privileged and wealthy family whilst ignoring the greater tragedy around them. As a Touching the Hours (let’s call them “Plato’s Mixed Pleasure Salvation” films because I feel like being a wanker) film, it does not have the necessary drive or progression from the characters that it is focusing on.

 Essentially, the family’s story just doesn’t quite work on a narrative level. If it were in a magazine article, or published online, it would be a fantastic read, and would probably blow up on Reddit. Taken as a longer tale, as either a book or a film, it doesn’t hang together because you can’t make an overarching story on the premise of “Family gets hit by tsunami, most people around them die, none of them do. What are the odds?!”, regardless of whether it's true or not. 

It is human nature to root for the underdog, and despite the grisly relish that The Impossible takes in depicting their agony, it’s difficult to think of the family as such.  They’ve already hit the jackpot in life by being rich, relatively happy and functional, and throughout the film, even through the screams and the crunches, I found myself being gobsmacked at their relative good fortune compared to those around them.

In the end, luck can make for good anecdotes, but making a story entirely about it? At the very least, it’s pretty improbable.