The Impossible Review

In 2004, the world stood still after one of the worst natural disasters in human history devastated the countries surroundings the Indian ocean. A tsunami of unimaginable proportions claimed the lives of a staggering 230 thousand people the day after Christmas. Humans have fought against earthquakes, hurricanes, and just about every thing else mother nature could through at us, but the tsunami was a whole new beast that came in the picture a crushed us. The story of The Impossible is a true one about a family of five on vacation in Thailand who got caught up in the tsunami. While playing in the pool at their hotel, they hear some sort of loud noise. The next thing they know a 15 foot wall of water is shredding through their hotel like it was nothing and heading right for them, once hit the family gets separated. The mother and the oldest son go one way and the father and the two youngest sons go another. After the initial waves pass, the mother and the son regroup. They decide to find a high place to hide out for a while in case more waves come through. They realize that the mother has a severely wounded leg and has a puncture wound in her chest. After being found by some locals, she is taken to a busy and overwhelmed hospital to be treated. While all this is going on you learn that the rest of their family has survived, and the father has to make the hardest decision of his life. Relief workers come to take survivors to the mountain and he decides to send his boys with them while he looks for the rest of his family. And the viewer is taken on an emotional trip in the hopes they find each other. The Impossible is a good movie, and it's a sad movie. It plays at your heart stings in several places. But that leads me to a problem I had with it, it tries to hard to be emotional. You ever see one of those more movies where it tries to be sadder than it is, that's kind of what The Impossible does. Another problem was that it got really slow later on in the movie. You see the tsunami hit after 15 minutes, but the next hour and 45 minutes aren't nearly as interesting. I don't want to say I was bored but the movie lost my full attention after a while. The most impressive part of the movie was the tsunami, not the special effects that made it happen but of the memories it was bringing back up. I remember the tsunami, it was the worst national disaster to happen in my lifetime and I remember that it made me sad. Once we went back to school after winter break my class put together a relief fund where we just donated a couple dollars. We knew it wouldn't help but it was the best we could do. All in all The Impossible is pretty good but I wouldn't say it's worth full price, it's a dollar theater movie. But if you want an emotional movie based on a true story with good acting and good cinematography, The Impossible is worth your time. 3.5/5