Review of The Impossible (2012) by Spencer P — 13 Dec 2017

Memorable not so much for its action or effects (though both are gripping and intense) but for its humanity. The only thing lacking is extending that humanity outward enough to encompass the full scale of the vast majority of the victims of this tragedy, who were not well-to-do caucasian tourists, but the natives of the Indian Ocean basin and nearby regions.

All those floating corpses and masses of brown people packed into those poorly-funded Thai hospitals and refugee camps who might have considered themselves lucky if they had the option of calling home to someone in the first world to let them know they were OK let alone a private jet from a high paying corporate job to fly them to a first rate hospital in Singapore once they managed to get out.

The film's stark empathy stands in contrast to the final scene... for all they'd been through, the disaster was something the tourists merely had to "escape", witch while a truly heart-wrenching, harrowing and close run gauntlet that may have been to run, was actually nevertheless quite a fortunate situation compared to those with no one to call; nowhere to escape to.

Many of those people and communities have still yet to recover, I'm sure, and while neither the characters nor the film share any blame for that, it is disapointing the film missed the chance to more overtly nod their head to that fact when given the chance.