The Impossible

The director is insanely talented and the story is one of the saddest events of the current era. I knew that this was about to be an emotional ride. It’d be weird if it wasn’t. The story that is based on real-life events might be focusing on only one of many families, but at the same time, it reflects the stories of all the families that stayed there and were affected by the tsunami. The filmmaking is so good that I couldn’t even believe how well the director connected CGI with reality. I must admit that at times, I was just gaping at the screen. Well, not at times, more like for two whole hours. The environment was so real that I felt as if the Spanish author truly had some small village flooded so he could shoot this movie to show each and every one of us just how terrible it all looked when the tsunami came. The cherry on top and the reason I decided to give this movie five stars was the moment when I read that the survivors were watching the movie and they said that the atmosphere couldn’t have been any more accurate. Hats off! (06/18/2013)

Finally, in this flood of dry and by-the-numbers award catchers, there is a film with heart that you can enjoy without a theoretical analysis. Impressive, intense, brilliantly made (the tsunami scene!) and touching like nothing in many years. Of course, sometimes the story is very clearly modified for the needs of the script (the casual mass reunion reminded me a little to the similarly made-up phone call in Argo). But when it works so well, who cares. (01/06/2013)

It hit me very hard. Maybe I’m getting soft in my old age. Perfectly played characters, neither Naomi Watts nor Ewan McGregor are trying to be falsely nice, the kids (like in reality) are sometimes begging for a spanking, but things rarely get out of hand. You can’t tell that when the wave washes everything away that it’s special effects. I don’t understand how they could film this so well without demolishing a hotel and defiling a bit of Thailand coastline. The introductory mayhem is replaced by emotionally draining search for the family split up by the catastrophe. And you know how everybody lies, saying they didn’t cry at the end of Titanic? That applies here for a whole half of the movie. The Impossible is a sincere tear-jerker with a powerful ending. Bayona is a director I will have to look out for in the future. His style turned a regular disaster movie into a breath-taking event where chills run up and down your spine, you feel nauseous and at the end you’re be so relieved that later you will cuddle up tight to your better half, female or male. I’m scared too. (02/04/2013)

I'm amazed by the design of the disaster - it's a demonstration of what a good filmmaker can do without an army of computers, only by working with perspective and shooting methods. For me, a completely equal affair with the sinking of the ship in Pi and his life smeared with mud and blood. Otherwise - I'm always wondering if the "real story" is just an alibi to excuse the usual schemes and clichés, or if the filmmaker can draw more than a few notorious lessons from the disaster about the fragility of man and the power of humanity (the last one who really captivated me was Danny Boyle and his rock climbing amputation). For me, in key moments The Impossible slips into uncovered exploitation, from which I soon lost all pleasure (sometimes I hesitated whether the tension was still meant seriously - vomiting of eyelashes and blood, which inadvertently looks like a B-movie horror scene). I want to see something more than just what I know from documentaries and the news, even if it's dressed in a masterful form. But the talk about the stars and the melodramatic passing are as if from a different sea than the realistic wave of dirt that so brutally tore me down against my will at the beginning. For Bayon, I actually have words of respect, but he really should be careful about the innocent submission to the expectations of the "genre". And he should try digging deeper, because this film is actually just "disaster tourism", where everything is solved by harmonious love... and good insurance. (01/30/2013)

A very, very, very good film. Strong, sensitive, appropriately dramatic and perhaps even authentic (or so it seemed). The performances of the adults and children were top-notch, the director conjured up almost "Malick-esque" moments at times (the meditative music also helped) and I blinked only a few times during the whole 113 minutes to make sure I would avoid missing anything. I really liked the fact that we learned only the bare essentials about the main characters at the beginning, and that the script avoided any flashbacks to the happy past or shots of the grieving relatives somewhere on the other side of the world. It is a pity that the DVD was a bit sloppy, because instead of the announced Czech subtitles and Czech subtitles for the deaf, it offered only the latter, and so I found the messages in square brackets quite distracting. For example, before the wave hit I read [strange sounds...] and then countless times [music...].__P.S. Do not read the content! (05/04/2014)