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The tsunami that devastated the Pacific Basin in the winter of 2004 remains one of the worst natural disasters in history. Although I assumed its climax, as shown in Clint Eastwood ’s film “ Hereafter ” (2010), would never be surpassed, that was before I had seen “The Impossible.” Here is a searing film of human tragedy.

We were London in 2004 when the disaster struck, and later we sat mesmerized in Biarritz, watching the news on television. Again and again, the towering wall of water rose from the sea, tossing trucks, buses and its helpless victims aside. Surely this was a blow from hell.

The victims in Eastwood’s film beheld it afar on home video. In director Juan Antonio Bayona ’s “The Impossible,” they seem lost in it, engulfed by it, damned by it.

As “The Impossible” begins, all is quiet at a peaceful resort beach in Thailand. Seconds later, victims are swept up like matchsticks. The film is dominated by human figures: a young British couple, Maria and Henry Bennett ( Naomi Watts and Ewan McGregor ), and their three young sons, Lucas, Simon and Thomas ( Tom Holland , Oaklee Pendergast and Samuel Joslin). All five fear they will never see their loved ones again.

In the earlier Eastwood film, they seem the victims of cruel destiny singling out a fate, perhaps foretold. In the Bayona film, have they been doomed by destiny? Seated in a dark theater, I reached out my hand for that of my wife’s. She and I had visited the same beach and discussed visiting it with our children and grandchildren. An icy finger ran slowly down our spines.

Such a connection can be terrifying. What does it mean? We are the playthings of the gods. As the film’s heroine, Naomi Watts powerfully becomes a front-runner for an Academy Award. Its eldest young hero, Lucas (Holland), separated from all, seeks tirelessly for fellow family members. How did anyone possibly survive? It takes a lot of courage for the little boy to bravely try to help others.

Spoilers follow, although the trailer and TV commercials reveal many of them. I’m happy I was blindsided by the story. We meet the Bennetts aboard a flight beginning their family holiday in Khao Lak, Thailand. We almost feel, rather than hear, a deeply alarming shift in the atmosphere. Something is fundamentally wrong. We see the tsunami from the tourists’ point of view. There is a shift in the universe, leaving behind a dazed group whose world is a jumble of destruction. They wander through the wreckage.

Maria is terrifyingly knocked through a glass wall and realizes she can see her son Lucas’ tiny head and body struggling to stay afloat in the surging flood waters. With indomitable strength and courage, she clings to debris, and they find themselves in a makeshift hospital that seems to have been somehow cobbled together. We realize she is the most seriously injured and begins to drift into and out of consciousness. She is a medical doctor and applies emergency first aid to herself.

Henry, tough and plucky, screams out the names of his two younger sons and loads them onto a truck bound for higher ground. The geographical layout miraculously seems halfway familiar to us after dozens of hours of cable news. All of those YouTube videos uploaded by strangers have been populated by characters we think of as people we know.

The film’s most dramatic sequences focus on Lucas, assigning himself the role of his mother’s lifeguard and protector. Now again, at another holiday season, this film becomes a powerful story of a family’s cohesive strength.

Director Juan Antonio Bayona and writer Sergio G. Sanchez combine visual effects in this film that are doubly effective because they strive to do their job without calling undue attention. It is a mark of great acting in a film when it succeeds in accomplishing what it must precisely when it is required. “The Impossible” is one of the best films of the year.

Roger Ebert

Roger Ebert was the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013. In 1975, he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism.

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The Impossible (2012)

Rated PG-13 for intense realistic disaster sequences, including disturbing injury images and brief nudity

114 minutes

Naomi Watts as Maria

Ewan McGregor as Henry

Tom Holland as Lucas

Geraldine Chaplin as Old woman

Oaklee Pendergast as Simon

Directed by

Juan Antonio Bayona
Sergio G. Sanchez

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The Impossible Reviews

... A moving, shocking, and visceral film. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 10/10 | Jan 2, 2024

This isn't a narrative of a larger-than-life hero swooping in to save the day; rather, it's a testament to the combined efforts of ordinary individuals, bound by humanity, who become heroes in the crucible of disaster.

Full Review | Dec 11, 2023

What one single movie can do is give at least one true story profound respect and realism. Most importantly, what the beauty of any movie can do is remind us all of the hope and survival that rises from the depths of tragedy and loss.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Sep 4, 2023

With the help of Maria Belon herself, Sergio G Sanchez's taut and tear-stained script never overplays its hand when it comes to sentimentality and cleverly keeps the audience in the dark (sometimes literally) for as long as possible...

Full Review | Original Score: 4.5/5 | Aug 18, 2023

A punishing experience, with hardly a moment after the first twenty minutes where a lump isn’t in your throat or tears welling up in your eyes.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4 | Sep 20, 2022

It tells an intensely affecting story and allows our senses to take it all in and react in our own way.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 22, 2022

It starts not with clever attempts at drawing emotions from the audience, but rather with blunt, staggering visuals to demand pity and sympathy.

Full Review | Original Score: 6/10 | Dec 1, 2020

In most years, Naomi Watts would be a shoo-in for an Oscar nomination with a performance that is absolutely mesmerizing and emotionally devastating.

Full Review | Original Score: 3.5/4.0 | Sep 11, 2020

'The Impossible' is a magnificent survival drama. [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Original Score: 7/10 | Jun 25, 2020

Dramatic and unwavering, The Impossible will make you believe that anything is possible.

Full Review | Nov 27, 2019

The purpose of Bayona's film is "dubious."

Full Review | Original Score: 2.5/5 | Nov 19, 2019

Sometimes it's sentimental to a fault, but the thrilling and innovative filmmaking that's being done makes it all worth it.

Full Review | Original Score: 7/10 | Aug 7, 2019

The Impossible may be schmaltz, but it's damn good schmaltz. It's the kind of story that is so incredible, so impossible, that it can only be true.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Aug 6, 2019

[The Impossible] shows us devastation, yes, unbelievable havoc, yes, horrific human loss, yes. But also, exemplary courage and love and compassion, all done with freshness and feeling.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Mar 21, 2019

The wrath of nature is re-created so masterfully by filmmaker Juan Antonio Bayona that it feels like a documentary.

Full Review | Jan 26, 2019

It might seem a noble project, aiming to show the rest of the world what hell some endured. But even a dramatic film can only suggest part of the experience. And I fear The Impossible might serve only to trivialize that experience.

Full Review | Original Score: 2/4 | Dec 18, 2018

Compelling and oozing with conflict and complexity, The Impossible is a heartfelt horror show worth its weight in reflective, ghoulish gold.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Nov 18, 2018

It's all superbly acted, with Watts especially delivering a powerful performance.

Full Review | Original Score: 4/5 | Aug 13, 2018

Bayona's staging of the tsunami without (seemingly without) digital effects is relentless, convincing, terrifying, non-stupid, and without Hollywood wonder.

Full Review | Apr 30, 2018

... Watts manages to transmit all the pain she suffers and what goes through the head of the protagonist... [Full review in Spanish]

Full Review | Jan 23, 2018

The Impossible : Naomi Watts Keeps This Disaster Film Afloat

The technical and emotional marvel from the Spanish filmmaking team of Juan Antonio Bayona and Sergio G. Sanchez hits you like a tidal wave

The Impossible, a feature film based on the true account of a Spanish family’s experiences during Indonesia ’s devastating 2004 tsunami, opens in darkness, with a dull roar. A calm blue ocean appears on the screen, then a plane screams into the frame as if catapulted from the projection booth. The start-stop motion jolts you into the churning, turbulent reality of The Impossible : in this cinematically recreated hell you’re going to see, feel and practically taste everything. The Impossible is technologically a marvel—the tsunami experience is harrowingly believable—but also emotionally rich. I hesitate to use this term, since it is so often equated with hokey, but The Impossible is life-affirming.

The noisy plane swooping over the ocean brings the Belon family to Thailand to spend the Christmas holiday on the beach. Henry Belon (Ewan McGregor) has a big job in Japan while Maria (Naomi Watts), trained as a doctor, stays home with their three young sons. Obviously, the Belons are no longer Spanish. Maybe Javier Bardem and Penelope Cruz weren’t available? Or maybe if you can get Naomi Watts and Ewan McGregor in your movie, you just make accommodations to the narrative. But it’s worth noting that of the estimated 282,000 people who died or disappeared in the tsunami, only about 1,000 were European, so the filmmakers were already starting from a point that could be contentious—what about all those dark skinned residents of the Third World who died or lost everything? Turning the Spaniards into blue-eyed blonde Brits only exacerbates the sense that this is a story about a very small, well-to-do segment of the victim pool.

( READ: Time’s list of 12 disaster movies that top Titanic )

However, The Impossible moves so fast that there’s scarcely any time to catch your breath, let alone dwell on such matters. Director Juan Antonio Bayona and writer Sergio G. Sanchez made a name for themselves with 2007’s elegant, slow-simmering horror film The Orphanage, but this time, they skip the tantalizing buildup. A typical Hollywood production would require someone to have an argument or misunderstanding prior to the wave hitting, just to heighten regrets and increase the sense of calamity. But the loving Belon family celebrates Christmas at their paradisiacal hotel, snorkel and dine by candlelight. Then in the morning, they hit the pool with books and balls.

The first warning they get of the oncoming wave is the clamor of departing birds. Maria is farthest back, and so endures the horror of watching her eldest, most independent son, Lucas (the fiercely good Tom Holland) struck first, then her husband and the two younger boys, 5 and 7. Watts’ primal screams as she clings to a tree are eloquent; how could anyone so small survive something so big? When Lucas is swept past her, alive, she lets go and follows him. It’s both a remarkable decision and completely understandable, not so much bravery as maternal necessity. When the waves finally subside, mother and son are battered and bloody but together. As they wade waist deep through an apocalyptic landscape, you feel them forming their own fierce little unit, one where all bets are off. “Is it over?” Lucas asks her. It’s clear that Maria has always had the answers, but she responds with terrifying uncertainty, “I don’t know.”

( READ: Remember how the world was supposed to end in 2012? TIME’s Richard Corliss on 2012 )

There are saving graces, a can of Coke plucked intact from the wreckage (it’s always Coke, right? Remember The Road ?), and the affections of a blonde boy the pair rescues, but Maria is badly wounded—Lucas nearly retches when he sees the flap of flesh hanging off her leg—and the movie doesn’t get any easier when the kindness of native strangers deposits them at a hospital. The wounded are zombies, coughing up unrecognizable, black objects, bleeding on the floor, too stunned to care. Maria could die of infection, or from whatever it was that punched a hole in her chest underwater. “You see that boy,” Maria tells the doctor attending her. “I’m all he’s got in the world.” If you’ve seen the too-revealing trailer for The Impossible , you know this isn’t true, and may think, as I did, that you know the whole story already. I was happy to be proved wrong; the entire family’s survival—Henry and the boys have their own heartwrenching challenges—provides its fair share of suspense.

Tsunamis are so unimaginable that the desire to see, to experience a Biblical wall of water for oneself, can run very deep (my own was the only reason to see Clint Eastwood’s off-key, Hereafter ). The Impossible slapped some sense into my lust for disaster porn by enlightening me, from this safe but still palpable distance, on what it’s like to be keelhauled through populated areas. It left me shaken.

But also strangely bolstered, ready to go out there and be fiercely strong, like Maria. The Impossible’s lessons about disorientation and adapting to disaster—it’s hard not to love Maria when she binds her wound with tree branches—can be applied well beyond the tsunami scenario. As to the question everyone asks—how would I cope?—Watt’s Maria gives you something to aspire to. Even flat on a cot with an oxygen mask on her face, Watts is constantly connecting, with Lucas, with the injured around her and with the audience. As an actress she gave greatly in Michael Haneke’s 2007 Funny Games and in 2009’s Mother and Child , but in the former her performance was limited by the film’s single key of sadism and few saw the latter. She’s always superlative, but The Impossible is Watts’ best performance in years. The Impossible is full of great special effects, and I’m enough of a natural disaster junkie that I’d have seen the movie just for them, but in the end what I’ll remember is Maria’s face, her cries and her determination.

READ: TIME’s Mary Pols on Naomi Watts in 2009’s Mother and Child SEE: Where Naomi Watt’s landed on Richard Corliss’s list of best performances in 2004

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Movie Review

Swept Away and Torn Apart in a Sea of Despair

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By A.O. Scott

Dec. 20, 2012

The Asian tsunami of Dec. 26, 2004, killed almost a quarter-million people in 14 countries. The scale and speed of the devastation defy comprehension, and no movie could be expected to convey the full measure of the horror. But disaster, real and imagined, is a staple of the modern cinematic imagination, and an event like the tsunami presents itself to an ambitious filmmaker as both a technical challenge and a moral risk.

“The Impossible,” the second feature from the Spanish director Juan Antonio Bayona, uses digital imagery, meticulous sound design and tried-and-true editing techniques to recreate both the violence of unleashed waters and the desolation that followed their assault on southern Thailand. Much more than Clint Eastwood’s “Hereafter,” which used the tsunami as a framing device for one of its tales of supernatural obsession, “The Impossible” plunges the audience into the catastrophe and then immerses us in the panic, grief and disorientation of the aftermath.

Mr. Bayona’s first film, “The Orphanage,” was a horror movie, a ghost story whose unusual emotional intensity was grounded in the anxious, desperate bond between mother and child. “The Impossible” is also, in its way, a horror film, with nature as the malevolent force threatening innocent lives. The dramatic emphasis is on the anguish of a mother and her son, who survive the waves and are separated from the rest of their family.

As the movie opens, Maria (Naomi Watts) and Henry (Ewan McGregor), an English couple living in Japan, are flying to Thailand with their three sons for a Christmas vacation at a luxurious beach resort. (The real people whose experiences inform “The Impossible” were a Spanish family of five on a similar trip.) They are troubled by the usual stresses — Henry worries about his job; Maria, a doctor who stopped practicing when they moved to Japan, wonders if she should go back to work; the boys bicker and whine — but they seem to be very nice people having a very good time.

Mr. Bayona and the screenwriter, Sergio G. Sánchez, do not spend much time filling in nuances of character. That job is left to the actors, who rise brilliantly to the task of showing the reactions of ordinary people to extreme circumstances. Maria is washed inland along with her oldest son, Lucas (Tom Holland), and is badly injured by the time they reach relatively dry land. Her fear, exhaustion and ferocious maternal determination dominate the first half of the movie, and Ms. Watts moves through these emotional states with instinctive grace and an intensity that is never showy. Mr. Holland, meanwhile, matures before our eyes, navigating the passage from adolescent self-absorption to profound and terrible responsibility. He is a terrific young actor.

And Mr. McGregor, his antic youthful energy tamed but not entirely suppressed, is a very persuasive and touching dad in distress. It is not giving much away to disclose that Henry and the two younger boys, Thomas (Samuel Joslin) and Simon (Oaklee Pendergast) also survive; Mr. Bayona is a nimble manipulator of audience feelings, but not a sadist. And his emphasis is less on the possibility of death than on the logistics of staying alive and searching for information and help. The sometimes excruciating suspense of “The Impossible” comes from the efforts of the parents and children to find one another despite geographic displacement, a shattered communication system and a chaotic relief effort.

Survivors are also witnesses, and “The Impossible” shows us, through the eyes of one unbelievably lucky family, some terrible things, including mangled bodies and parents in despair. But as Maria and Henry’s ordeal unfolds, the film’s focus starts to feel distressingly narrow. Virtually everyone shown suffering after the tsunami is a European, Australian or American tourist, and the fact that the vast majority of the dead, injured and displaced were Asian never really registers. At one point Maria and Lucas are cared for by residents of a small village and later they are helped by Thai doctors, but these acts of selfless generosity are treated like services to which wealthy Western travelers are entitled. And the terrible effects of the tsunami on the local population are barely acknowledged.

This is not to dismiss the real anguish of people like the family on whose miraculous survival Mr. Bayona’s movie is based, nor to scold the director for making this movie instead of another. But there is a troubling complacency and a lack of compassion in “The Impossible,” which is less an examination of mass destruction than the tale of a spoiled holiday. You could also say that it is a movie about the consequences of global inequality, but unfortunately only by accident.

“The Impossible” is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). Death and destruction, tactfully handled.

Watch A. O. Scott on “The Sweet Spot” with David Carr, on culture and criticism, at nytimes.com.

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The impossible, common sense media reviewers.

Very intense story of family's survival against the odds.

A Lot or a Little?

What you will—and won't—find in this movie.

Ultimately, The Impossible is a story of a mother

Maria and Lucas do everything they can to help eac

The devastation the tsunami causes is catastrophic

Adults at the resort kiss and dance and embrace. T

Strong language includes a tween swearing. Words i

Grown-ups drink at the hotel bar and a dinner part

Positive Messages

Ultimately, The Impossible is a story of a mother and son's devotion to each other after the unthinkable has happened. The movie reinforces the random way that natural disasters cause destruction. There's no reason some people survive and others perish; it's a terrible tragedy with unthinkable consequences. But throughout the calamity, people show each other extraordinary kindness and generosity, sending the message that even in times of despair, there are moments of hope and small miracles to celebrate.

Positive Role Models

Maria and Lucas do everything they can to help each other survive. There are several times when Lucas must act like the parent and take care of his mother. He even has to literally carry and hoist her up a tree. Although it's a burden, Maria convinces Lucas to save a little toddler boy they find.

Violence & Scariness

The devastation the tsunami causes is catastrophic. People are swept away in a wall of water, drowned or impaled or crushed by debris. Maria is seriously injured as her body makes impact in the rush of water. At one point, she's incredibly bloody and has a large flap of skin hanging off of her leg. People taken to the hospital are grieving the loss of their loved ones. Kids and teens will especially feel for Lucas, who at one point believes his mother is dead. Both Maria and Henry think the other has died. A tween yells at his mother a few times.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Violence & Scariness in your kid's entertainment guide.

Sex, Romance & Nudity

Adults at the resort kiss and dance and embrace. There's nudity, but in a completely asexual way. The mom, who was wearing a bathing suit when the tsunami struck, doesn't realize her breast is exposed until her son mentions it.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Sex, Romance & Nudity in your kid's entertainment guide.

Strong language includes a tween swearing. Words include "hell" and "goddamn."

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Language in your kid's entertainment guide.

Drinking, Drugs & Smoking

Grown-ups drink at the hotel bar and a dinner party.

Did you know you can flag iffy content? Adjust limits for Drinking, Drugs & Smoking in your kid's entertainment guide.

Parents Need to Know

Parents need to know that The Impossible is an intense family drama set against the 2004 Asian tsunami. Because of the subject matter, there are many upsetting sequences, particularly in the first half hour after the tsunami hits. People are shown swept away and presumably killed by the rushing wall of water, and a mother is so severely injured that a part of her skin is no longer attached to her body. Parents, please know that you, too, will be affected by the horrors depicted in the film -- none greater than when a boy believes he's all that's left of his immediate family. To stay in the loop on more movies like this, you can sign up for weekly Family Movie Night emails .

Where to Watch

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Community Reviews

Parents say (20)
Kids say (108)

Based on 20 parent reviews

So well done, but disappointed with the nudity(non-sexual)

Frighteningly realistic and sobering, yet uplifting, what's the story.

Based on the true story of a Spanish family that survived the 2004 Asian tsunami, THE IMPOSSIBLE follows Henry ( Ewan McGregor ) and Maria ( Naomi Watts ), a British couple who travels to a luxury resort in Thailand for a Christmas holiday. They have three kids: tween Lucas ( Tom Holland ) and two younger boys. On Dec. 26, 2004, as the family is playing poolside, the massive tsunami hits the area, sweeping thousands into the ocean. Maria survives the worst but is gravely injured. She finds her oldest, and together she and Lucas attempt to overcome each devastating moment.

Is It Any Good?

Movies about a massively destructive event, whether it's a war or 9/11, can be difficult to watch and even more difficult to make well. By focusing on one family, director Juan Antonio Bayona wisely distills the tsunami tragedy down to the myopic perspective of one distraught woman and her mature-beyond-his-years son. Watts and Holland's interactions beautifully capture the bond between mother and child.

Watts is terrific, and Holland is remarkable -- reminiscent of young Hunter McCracken in The Tree of Life . No longer a little boy but far from a man, Holland's Lucas is fiercely determined to survive and help his mother secure medical attention. Once they safely land at a Thai hospital, the story loses some of its immediacy, but then we find out what happened to the father and brothers thought lost. The Impossible isn't an easy viewing experience, but it reminds us all that even in times of despair, there are moments of hope and small miracles to celebrate.

Talk to Your Kids About ...

Families can talk about whether The Impossible is a disaster movie or not. How does the depiction of the tsunami compare to other films about catastrophes? Critics have said the movie's ending takes away from its powerful beginning. Do you agree?

What feelings do you have while watching this movie? Is it OK to feel happy for the main characters amid so much devastation?

Are cinematic deaths resulting from disasters or accidents different than those due to war or other forms of violence ?

The Impossible is based on a real family's true story. How accurate do you think it is? Why might filmmakers decide to change some details/facts? How could you find out more?

Movie Details

In theaters : December 21, 2012
On DVD or streaming : April 23, 2013
Cast : Ewan McGregor , Naomi Watts , Tom Holland
Director : Juan Antonio Bayona
Inclusion Information : Female actors
Studio : Summit Entertainment
Genre : Drama
Topics : History
Run time : 114 minutes
MPAA rating : PG-13
MPAA explanation : intense realistic disaster sequences, including disturbing injury images and brief nudity
Last updated : May 11, 2024

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The Impossible – review

T his Spanish movie, scripted by Sergio G Sánchez and directed by JA Bayona, the team responsible for the accomplished Spanish horror movie The Orphanage , is a carefully researched account of one family's experience of the tsunami that struck south-west Asia on Boxing Day 2004, taking the lives of more than 250,000 people and causing untold destruction. Henry Bennett (Ewan McGregor), a British businessman working in Japan, his wife Maria (Naomi Watts), a doctor temporarily retired from practice, and their three preteen sons are spending their Christmas vacation at a luxury Thai resort. They're having an idyllic time playing with their presents and snorkelling in the crystalline water, but there's something amiss. The kids are fractious, a page keeps blowing out of the thin book Maria is reading, and Henry gets a text message that he's about to lose his job. Then suddenly their world is turned upside down as the tsunami strikes while they sit around the pool.

There follows a spectacular, visceral re-creation of the gigantic wave and its horrendous consequences that separate the Bennetts, carrying the seriously injured Maria inland along with her eldest son, Lucas (Tom Holland), and leaving Henry near to the shore with the young boys, Thomas and Simon. Neither party knows the others are alive, and the pain of separation is palpable. Lucas first falters then rises to the occasion, escorting his mother to hospital and then taking on the job of uniting parents with their lost children. Henry briefly loses his nerve but recovers, putting his small sons into safe hands to search for their mother. One boy, already fascinated by astronomy, has a moving encounter with Geraldine Chaplin (ungallantly billed as Elderly Woman) about cosmic matters.

The film is well acted, the makeup convincing, the turbulent mise en scène impeccable. We are immersed in the immediate experience of the tsunami, but its larger context and its consequences are ignored. The film carries a declaration that this is the true story of a representative family. In fact the real family were Spanish, the Alvarez Belóns, whose story has been transformed into an English-speaking one, designed for worldwide acceptance. The final credits are prefaced by a photo of the Alvarez Belóns, smiling for the camera, dark-haired and good-looking, and physically not much like the fair-haired Bennetts.

Drama films
The Observer
Ewan McGregor
Indian Ocean tsunami 2004
Natural disasters and extreme weather

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DVD & Streaming

The Impossible

Content caution.

In Theaters

December 21, 2012
Naomi Watts as Maria Bennett; Ewan McGregor as Henry Bennett; Tom Holland as Lucas Bennett; Samuel Joslin as Thomas Bennett; Oaklee Pendergast as Simon Bennett

Home Release Date

April 23, 2013
Juan Antonio Bayona

Distributor

Summit Entertainment

Movie Review

The Bennetts need a vacation. And while you may not think of a beach getaway in Thailand as the perfect setting for Christmas break, Henry is hoping it’ll prove to be a good choice.

He, his wife, Maria, and their three boys have been living in Japan for a while now, thanks to his job. But with a shake-up looming at the office, things could be changing in not-so-great ways. And eldest son Lucas has been going through that early teen angst period. So getting away and frolicking in the sun and surf for a week might just let them all unwind a little.

The first two days are great. The Khao Lak resort is brand-new and spotless. They spend Christmas Eve on the beach. They share great food that night. They launch floating lanterns into the evening breeze.

Christmas Day, just fabulous. Gifts. Laughter. More sunshine.

The 26th of December, however, starts off with a little something odd. A strange rumbling sound. The wind changes suddenly. The island birds start going crazy. What’s this all about? From their spots around the hotel pool everything looks fine.

But why are the palm trees shaking like that? Henry and the little ones stop their splashing in the wading pool and look up. Is that tree tumbling over sideways? Is the—

A 90-foot wave roars in from the ocean. It crests the pool area wall. And Henry and Maria both start screaming for the boys … just before everything is obliterated.

Positive Elements

The Bennetts are washed away, along with thousands of others on the island. They’re left battered and bloodied by the raging waters. The first of the clan we see pop up from the murky depths is Maria … and she immediately throws herself into danger to rescue Lucas, who she sees floating by on the surging tide. Then the two of them struggle to keep each other alive as they tumble and bob.

When they finally make it out of the debris-choked flow, Maria has sustained some pretty severe wounds. But despite her condition, she urges her son to help a young boy they hear crying from under some wreckage. Lucas refuses at first to risk being out in the open in case another wave hits. But Maria tells him that they must, “Even if it’s the last thing we do.”

Those panicked moments set up the story’s central self-sacrificial theme. We see scores of complete strangers doing whatever they can to help and comfort those in need. And the young boy’s rescue ultimately teaches Lucas a vital lesson about the value of life and sacrifice that impacts him deeply.

At one point in an overcrowded hospital, a suffering Maria urges Lucas to go out and help others rather than just sitting by her side. So he sets out to try to reconnect kids and their parents. Henry applies that same forward-driving self-sacrificial attitude in trying to find his lost family members. He refuses to stop looking even though it means putting himself in difficult and dangerous situations. He tells his young son, “The most scary bit for me was when I came up and I was all alone. And then I saw the two of you, I didn’t feel so scared anymore.”

Even before the incredibly destructive natural disaster hits, it’s evident that Henry and Maria love their boys dearly. Henry is always ready to roughhouse and play at a moment’s notice. And after the tsunami it’s clear that both parents would readily die to save their kids or each other. Their love and devotion is fully reciprocated: When Maria is hampered by her wounds, young Lucas strains to help her climb to safety. Even 7-year-old Thomas steps up to protect and comfort his younger sibling when they’re by themselves.

Spiritual Elements

The Bennetts enjoy Christmas morning together, though there’s no apparent connection to the spiritual side of the holiday.

Sexual Content

Always in nonsexual contexts we several times see Maria’s bare breasts. First it’s a brief side view as she’s dressing. Then, after the flood, she and Lucas are climbing out of the water and her tank top has been tattered by the buffeting debris, exposing her chest. Lucas quickly turns away, saying, “I can’t see you like this.” (The camera sees and then pulls away too.) A terribly embarrassed Maria ties her shirt together as best she can, and some women later offer her better covering. When they make it to the hospital a doctor starts cutting her clothing away to repair the massive wound on her chest, and again Lucas must turn away from his mother’s nakedness that moviegoers also see.

Lucas spots a fully nude man walking beside the road as the truck he’s riding in buzzes quickly by. (We can tell he’s naked, but the bouncing camera obscures the details.)

Before and after the tsunami, men and women wear various pieces of swimwear; some of the women have on bikinis. A stray joke alludes to hippies all sleeping in the same bed … “just like your old college days.”

Violent Content

The tsunami’s impact on the island is truly devastating, and the movie depicts it very realistically. People are tossed about and slammed into solid objects by the churning waters. Scores of dead bodies float underwater. More corpses lay facedown in the mud or along the side of the road. We see a pickup truck packed with corpses stacked like cord wood. Henry searches through body bag after body bag for his family.

In the hospital we’re shown hundreds of injured people. Some sport badly broken, torn and twisted limbs. The rooms are crammed full, many with the floors and walls splattered with blood and filth. A female patient vomits blood. And Maria gags on a long stringy object that she pulls from her throat.

That’s the least of Maria’s worries, though; her wounds are the most gruesome we see up close. When she finally rises out of the water with Lucas we can see a large gouge in her upper torso, along with numerous bloody scrapes and slashes over most of her body and face. One of her eyes is badly bruised and bloodied, and it nearly swells shut. A ripped open cut in her upper thigh shows that a slab of skin and muscle has been cut out and left dangling from the profusely bleeding wound. She wraps this injury with a dirty cloth and trails blood until she can no longer carry her own weight.

Later, in a flashback, we see how Maria received all that terrible damage as we watch the flood waters smash her through a glass wall and then tumble her savagely over and through flesh-tearing branches, broken masonry and other underwater debris.

Henry has quite a few scrapes, cuts and bruises as well, including a hemorrhaged pupil. We don’t see him get hurt, except for when he takes a crashing fall while searching for his wife. He then drags himself up from the offending hole, covered in blood. Henry and Maria both cry out in agony at times.

A car floats by, and we hear a screaming baby’s cry echo out from the vehicle’s interior. Long aerial camera shots reveal just how demolished the populated parts of the island are.

Crude or Profane Language

We hear “h-ll” three times in an emotionally overwhelming sequence when mother and son are reunited.

Drug and Alcohol Content

The Bennetts’ hotel room refrigerator is stocked with soda and beer. Henry and Maria talk of sharing a glass of wine after the kids go to bed.

What do you do when all the little expected things of life are ripped away from you? When the laptops and expensive shoes, sibling squabbles and job worries are all crushed beneath a tidal wave and your life is left hanging by a thread? What’s really important then? What do you reach for?

Those are the questions The Impossible —a movie based on a real family’s impossible struggles during the devastating Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004—asks and answers. And it does so quite powerfully.

It talks of an undying human spirit, showing us the fiece protectiveness complete strangers can muster for one another. The illustrates the unyielding care and loyalty a parent bestows upon a child, a husband upon a wife. It speaks of the purity of self-sacrifice, the anguish of loss and the strength of love.

The film’s raging tsunami special effects are flat-out stunning. The acting is utterly convincing. And the tense tale of scattered family members fighting to stay alive while desperately searching for nothing more than a reassuring touch of a loved one’s hand or a tearful comforting embrace, is immersive and very, very moving.

It’s also quite terrifying and wrenching. The realistic death, devastation, excruciating pain, bloody filth, and visceral glimpses of torn, naked flesh are difficult images to see—as they impart a life-affirming tale unlike so many others that surround it.

After spending more than two decades touring, directing, writing and producing for Christian theater and radio (most recently for Adventures in Odyssey, which he still contributes to), Bob joined the Plugged In staff to help us focus more heavily on video games. He is also one of our primary movie reviewers.

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Movie Reviews

Reliving an 'impossible' catastrophe.

Jeannette Catsoulis

The Impossible is based on the true story of a family's brush with disaster while vacationing in the Pacific. Jose Haro/Summit Entertainment hide caption

The Impossible

Director: Juan Antonio Bayona
Genre: Drama
Running time: 114 minutes

Rated PG-13 for intense realistic disaster sequences, including disturbing injury images and brief nudity

With: Ewan McGregor, Naomi Watts

Watch A Clip

'Swept Everyone Away'

Credit: Summit Entertainment

Starring flying debris and surging walls of water, The Impossible takes the template of the old-timey disaster movie, strips it to the bone and pumps what's left up to 11.

Decades ago, perched in front of Earthquake and The Poseidon Adventure and The Towering Inferno , audiences were rewarded with thrills that depended on fleshed-out characters ( Steve McQueen as a fire chief!) and multiple interconnected storylines. How pampered we were.

Because this based-on-true-life tale of a Spanish family trapped in Thailand by the 2004 tsunami is much worse than a disaster: It's an ordeal. As punishing to watch as it must have been to film — especially for Naomi Watts, who absorbs most of the abuse — this sledgehammer of a picture never lets up. From start to finish, Watts' pale, slender body is pummeled, gored, pierced and raked over what looks like acres of saw grass and jagged detritus. Like James Franco in 127 Hours (an ordeal movie if ever there was one), Watts isn't so much battling the elements as battling the frailties of her own flesh.

Cycling through the late-night talk shows, Watts and her co-star, Ewan McGregor, have been extolling a slavish devotion to accuracy on the part of the film's Spanish director, Juan Antonio Bayona, and his screenwriter, Sergio G. Sanchez. It bears mentioning, however, that this precision has a very narrow focus, encouraging us to care only about a single (white, wealthy) family among the hundreds of thousands of (mostly poor, mostly brown) locals killed and maimed. For all the energy and ingenuity lavished on the project — the first to revolve around this century's greatest natural tragedy — you'd think there would have been room to explore the wider suffering.

Maria (Naomi Watts) and Lucas (Tom Holland) are ripped from their family by a tsunami. Jose Haro/Summit Entertainment hide caption

Maria (Naomi Watts) and Lucas (Tom Holland) are ripped from their family by a tsunami.

This microscopic approach may be economical, but it casts a pall of selfishness over events that might have read differently had the filmmakers exhibited a more universal compassion. (Those early disaster movies knew it was more humane, not just smarter filmmaking, to offer us a variety of victims.) So when businessman Henry Bennett (McGregor) dumps his two youngest sons with strangers while he hunts for his wife, Maria (Watts), and their oldest son, Lucas (a remarkable Tom Holland), he seems less the worried patriarch than a man accustomed to offloading inconveniences.

As it turns out, Henry is pretty much peripheral to the action anyway. From the moment the family, hours after arriving at a luxury beach resort, is separated by the mountainous tidal wave, he barely registers. Stuck on the fringes of the movie and squinting through a bad case of pinkeye, Henry and his quest are completely obliterated by the mother-son drama unfolding at its center.

And as Maria and Lucas make their slow, bloody way across a devastated landscape, her wide-open wounds are captured with almost sickening authenticity. Audience members have reportedly fainted during screenings, and it's not hard to see why; this isn't a film you want to experience after a heavy lunch.

Visually stunning but manipulative in the extreme — try not to roll your eyes as the various family members miss one another by inches — The Impossible nevertheless contains two of the year's best performances. Though presented as nothing more than a survival machine, Watts snags our sympathy through subtle shifts in expression and tone.

And young Holland (just 13 when he joined the production in 2009) is a marvel: When Lucas, after losing his mother in the chaos of a crowded hospital, finds her being prepped for emergency surgery, his angry relief is the film's most touching moment.

Unfortunately it's followed by one of the funniest. "Think of something nice," advises a nurse as she places an anesthesia mask over Maria's face. Like maybe a beach vacation?

Movie review: ‘The Impossible’ has the right touch with real horror

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So terrifying is the 2004 tsunami as imagined in “The Impossible,” its destructive force engulfing the screen with such violent menace, that the imagery alone elicits a rising dread so intense you may feel yourself gasping for breath.

Spanish-born director J.A. Bayona must have been tempted to let the monstrous waves triggered by the Indian Ocean earthquake that devastated South East Asia and left hundreds of thousands dead overwhelm the dramatic story he tells.

That never happens in this profoundly moving film inspired by the real-life experience of the Alvarez Belon family on that fateful December day. Naomi Watts and Ewan McGregor star as Maria and Henry, on holiday with their three boys at a Thailand beach resort, and the film introduces gifted young Tom Holland as the couple’s oldest son Lucas.

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Bayona achieves a rare sense of balance between the big and the powerful as well as the small and the intimate in the family’s survival against impossible odds, no doubt the inspiration for the title. Their situation was heartbreaking, their courage in the face of it humbling. It is the kind of ode to the human spirit that you hope comes along, and not just during the holiday season.

One surprise is that it took a horror auteur to pull off such a grounded film without letting the tsunami, or the sentiment, get out of control, although he had an abundance of both in Sergio G. Sanchez’s screenplay. You could argue that “The Impossible” could have benefited from more nuance in the dialogue, but that flaw only slightly dims the power of the film.

As the movie opens, Maria and Henry are on a turbulent flight with their boys, Lucas, Thomas (Samuel Joslin) and Simon (Oaklee Pendergast). A smooth landing and 24 hours later, the Christmas presents dispensed and wrapping paper crumpled on the floor, they head to the pool. Bayona uses that brief calm before the tsunami to do more than introduce us to the people whose journey we will follow.

In a handful of scenes, the director lays the framework for the way in which he will use sight and sound to define their experience. The deafening roar of the jet engines, the glassy ocean underneath it, the eerie silence that thickens in the moments before the tsunami hits, and the muffled screams of Maria when it does, are beyond even what Bayona achieved in his petrifying Cannes Film Festival debut a few years ago. “The Orphanage,” also written by Sanchez, was a far more traditional genre film, though the director’s understanding of the fear that comes with the loss of control — those moments when forces beyond you take over your fate — very much infiltrated that film too.

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For his second feature film, Bayona has significantly refined the sensory sensibilities, working once again with cinematographer Oscar Faura, whose impressive background includes other unsparing examinations of the human condition, notably 2010’s “Biutiful,” with Javier Bardem, and 2004’s “The Machinist,” with Christian Bale. You believe it when the filmmakers say the eight or so minutes of the tidal wave that we see on screen was a year in preparation and a month in shooting the special and visual effects veterans Felix Berges and Pau Costa created.

Like the experience of the family separated by the tsunami, the narrative is split between Maria and Lucas’ journey and Henry’s with the two younger boys, though the mother and son arc dominates. In the panic that overtakes Maria when she surfaces to a vast churn of water and debris, alone, no sight of her family or anyone else, the odds of survival are laid out. When she spots Lucas struggling in the current, the clash between incredible hope and absolute fear surfaces. Both those emotions carry the film.

Soon it becomes clear that coming out alive is no guarantee of survival. Maria’s injuries are grave and in that moment when Lucas sees a gaping wound and whispers “Mama,” the boy becomes a man. The many ways in which Lucas is forced to grow up in just a matter of days, and Maria’s instinctive understanding that to come out of this intact she must find a way to guide her son’s choices even as she lies near death, is the real heart of the movie. Holland and Watts’ onscreen bond is one of the most poignant aspects of the film.

As is always the case in disasters like these, the road to help is paved by the care and generosity of strangers, and the movie is filled with the many small acts of kindness extended to the family along the way. The villagers who rip off a door to carry Maria, the man who lends Henry his cell phone despite the precious minutes of battery life he will lose.

Henry spends the hours after the tsunami walking through the devastation screaming Maria and Lucas’ names, McGregor channeling such grief in every labored step. Soon he is forced to trust his 5- and 7-year-old boys to others so they can go to the safety of the hills as his search for the rest of the family continues.

Miles away in an over-crowded hospital, Maria faces multiple surgeries in the crudest of circumstances. The scope of the damage and the difficult realities are woven in. Pick-up trucks carrying bodies, the makeshift message boards with names of the missing, aid workers trying to keep up with the unending string of injuries, the parentless children, the childless parents, random family photos covered in mud, final notes left behind, houses reduced to matchstick heaps, and the growing field of bodies in bags become the backdrop. It was a fine line to walk to show the extent of the disaster and its human cost without making the moments feel like exploitation. The filmmakers have handled it with a sensitivity that is respectful of the loss.

Though many people will know the ending before they walk into the theater, that doesn’t make “The Impossible” any less affecting. For it is in the details — the many ways in which fate and circumstance intervened, and what survival required of each member of the Alvarez Belon family — that you find the far better story.

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The Impossible

Time Out says

There are few certainties in this world, but cinema offers one: There’s no global calamity that can’t be rendered relatable by putting a white face on it. While nonnatives accounted for under 4 percent of the 280,000 casualties of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, The Impossible revisits its devastation through the true story of a family of European vacationers (Spanish in real life, British on film). When the clan is violently separated after an apocalyptic tidal wave hits their coastal Thailand resort, Mom (Naomi Watts) manages to corral her eldest son (Tom Holland) and seek shelter in a tree. Meanwhile, Dad (Ewan McGregor) desperately searches for them in hospitals and shelters, losing track of the couple’s two younger boys in the process.

Director J.A. Bayona directed the exuberantly nasty Spanish ghost story The Orphanage (2007), and he treats this natural disaster as the ultimate horror tale, featuring a rising saltwater monster that overwhelms our protagonists. (The impact sequence, with its rush of unceasing mortal danger, is genuinely terrifying.) When it comes to human emotions, however, the filmmaker is all thumbs, crassly fumbling for audience response via clichéd uses of dropped-out sound and the occasional twinkling piano. An impending “impossible” family reunion at a sprawling clinic is callously delayed ad nauseam, the camera delighting in cleverly choreographed missed connections while panning past seas of undifferentiated injured natives—their traumas literally peripheral to the experiential entertainment.

Follow Eric Hynes on Twitter: @eshynes

Release Details

Duration: 114 mins

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Movie Review: The Impossible (2012)

Aaron Leggo
Movie Reviews
4 responses
--> January 23, 2013

The Impossible (2012) by The Critical Movie Critics

Surviving the impact.

Cinematic sentimental gestures don’t come much more desperately inspirational than the slow motion shot of a person reaching skyward with a swelling score accompanying their ascent. In his syrupy drama The Impossible , director J.A. Bayona reserves this moment for the third act, but it’s not like the sentimentality sneaks up on us. This kind of exaggerated emotion is in the movie’s DNA right from the start, when some onscreen text reminding us of the 2004 tsunami lingers on the words “true story,” guaranteeing that we can’t ignore the dramatic importance of the impending narrative. Before we see a single frame of footage, the movie already hits a suggestively syrupy chord.

Introducing us to Maria (Naomi Watts), Henry (Ewan McGregor) and their three sons Lucas (Tom Holland), Thomas (Samuel Joslin) and Simon (Oaklee Pendergast) in a stilted scene of worried banter aboard a plane doesn’t help secure that sense of realism that Bayona desires, but before long, we’re on the ground and Bayona is fully invested in foreshadowing. The vacationing family are shown around the Thai resort that they’re staying at and the tour of the place is solely focused on how amazing and new and wonderful and lovely and relaxing this place is. Hmm . . . I think I hear a wave coming to prove you wrong, bellhop.

Even after they settle in, Maria, Henry, and the kids share a few moments together, but Bayona’s camera keeps drifting off to solemnly stare out at the ocean. Building suspense is one thing, but constantly reminding us of the imminent disaster that we know is on its way just feels obnoxious. At the very least, it’s dramatically inert. It seems as though Bayona doesn’t want to miss a clichéd beat, so eager is he to lend every scene, every moment a touch of gooey resonance. But when he gets to the tsunami sequence quite early on, he manages to mix surging horror with the sentimental flourishes that he seemingly can’t resist.

This particular sequence still takes stops along the way to get in touch with its sappy side (close-ups of hands reaching for each other, the nearly muted soundtrack that depicts a character’s disorienting experience), but the overall effect is undeniably frightening and intense. We see the water topple tall palm trees before it smashes into the resort, engulfing everything. Bayona hurls us into the powerful pull of the water with Maria, who clings to a tree in a claustrophobically tight shot that soon switches to a higher, wider angle to reveal the sheer immensity of the surging water and the emptiness of its surface.

This pair of juxtaposed shots, the individual in close-up and then the individual as a small piece in a vast wasteland, is a favorite visual motif of Bayona’s. It soon becomes tired and obvious, but he does manage to conjure some impactful moments during the disaster sequence. Convincingly capturing the hellish horror of underwater obstacles that threaten to impale at a moment’s notice, Bayona, cinematographer Óscar Faura and the astonishing effects team turn the roiling, muddy sea into a treacherous enigma that maliciously hides its greatest threats just below the surface. The nightmare of the wave eventually subsides, but it’s left many a mark on Maria, her body badly torn up from her nasty journey.

Along the way, Maria soon reconnects with Lucas, while we later catch up with Henry and their other two boys. With the water no longer flowing, Bayona turns to sap and quickly embraces his freedom to explore the story’s sentimentality with an arsenal of weepy clichés. A phone call home isn’t just about the emotion of the onscreen caller, but also the looks on the faces of other sad survivors and the encouragement to revisit the phone call for maximum dramatic effect. Meanwhile, Lucas’s search for something to do in a crowded Thai hospital leads to him running around and recording the names of missing loved ones currently sought by ailing patients. He then runs around some more while yelling out their names, hoping to reconnect two separated souls. In Bayona’s hands, this act of good samaritanism is wringed of its dramatic potential and reduced to one more shamelessly sentimental distractions.

The perfect vacation.

Such is the case with most of The Impossible , post-tsunami landfall. This is a supposedly impossible tale of a severed family finding each other again across a greatly devastated divide, so the potential for sappiness is clearly high. But the potential for quiet, contemplative drama is also present. Bayona simply seems so enamored with the cinematic familiarity of recycled sentimentality that he’s willing to settle for empty emotions. When it comes time for a metaphor about the “beautiful mystery” of dead or dying stars to rear its ugly head, it’s clear that the movie has crossed the syrupy point of no return.

Oddly enough, while the performances are all compliant with the sentimentality, each actor feeding it in their own way, the acting itself is more of a highlight than a detriment. Watts is quite good in a demanding and punishing role that leaves her either floating through debris or clinging to life in a hospital bed. The sudden change from a physically active role to an inactive one gives her interestingly opposing shades of experience to work with. The kids are all pretty decent, with each of them managing to be relatively believable in the context of a harrowing journey. McGregor is the weakest link and the most susceptible to the sap, but for all the bad scenes he has, he still convinces as a downtrodden dad.

None of the performances are able to elevate the material of The Impossible above the syrupy space where Bayona has anchored it and that is the insurmountable problem. For everything the movie gets right, either in relatively commendable performances or absolutely phenomenal makeup effects, it can’t rise up from its modest ambitions to tackle the truth of its story with dramatically fortified focus. The movie is seemingly always searching for a cliché it hasn’t already dragged through the mud. And while he does the dragging with gusto, Bayona seems only capable of cheapening the drama. After all, he’s clearly just waiting to reveal that skyward thrust he practically promises the whole way through. The force with which he tugs at our heartstrings rivals that of the tsunami. This is a tidal wave of treacle, eager to unleash a flood of tears. Well, will you settle for an eyeroll?

Tagged: disaster , Thailand , tsunami , vacation

You and I both know the truth. You just don't admit it.

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'Movie Review: The Impossible (2012)' have 4 comments

January 23, 2013 @ 9:40 am ivan

this movie sucked

January 23, 2013 @ 12:23 pm DroneStrike

Not my kind of movie..

January 23, 2013 @ 1:03 pm BovineMagus

Water ain’t no joke. Force feeding drama unecessarily is.

January 23, 2013 @ 6:29 pm Tigress

If there is an award for the most intense natural disaster recreated for film, it would go to “The Impossible”.

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The Impossible Parent Guide

Adults and the oldest of teens will likely be inspired by the tenacity of the human spirit that still surfaces in the face of unimaginable calamity..

A vacationing family is torn apart when the floodwaters of the 2004 Tsunami crash over their Thailand hotel. Facing impossible odds, the father (Ewan McGregor) and two of his sons (Oaklee Pendergast and Samuel Joslin) set out to find his wife (Naomi Watts) and other missing child (Tom Holland).

Release date December 20, 2012

Run Time: 107 minutes

Official Movie Site

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The guide to our grades, parent movie review by kerry bennett.

On December 26, 2004 an earthquake in the Indian Ocean spawned a tsunami that struck South Asian coastlines with an incredible wall of water, leaving over 200,000 people dead in its wake. Around the world, people watched the news reports with a sense of dismay. But for those at the center of the disaster, the horrors only grew after the water receded. The Impossible , directed by Spanish filmmaker Juan Antonio Bayona and based on the real life experiences of Maria Belon and her husband Henry. It tells the story of just one of the thousands of families swept up in the events of that day.

Henry and Maria (played by Ewan McGregor and Naomi Watts) arrive at an idyllic shoreline resort in Thailand for a relaxing Christmas vacation with their boys Lucas (Tom Holland), Thomas (Samuel Joslin) and Simon (Oaklee Pendergast). Then, without warning, a tidal wave of churning, dirty, debris-filled water crashes down on the resort battering the guests and employees as it plunges over them. When she finally fights her way to the surface, Maria is cut, bruised and partially unclothed from the force of the water. In the distance she catches sight of Lucas rushing along in the current. Finally, the two of them latch on to the trunk of a floating tree. But the rest of their family is nowhere to be seen.

Meanwhile, a shoeless and blood-covered Henry, still in a state of shock, leaves Thomas and Simon in the care of a stranger (Nicola Harrison) and begins searching for his missing wife and son. But in the confusion, the two younger boys are whisked away with a truckload of orphans.

Because many of the extras in the film are actual survivors of the tsunami, there is a sense of authenticity to the emotional shock that follows the watery event. Yet the film focuses almost exclusively on “white” victims with little acknowledgement of the thousands of locals who lost not only their lives or loved ones, but their homes and livelihoods as well. (Even Henry and Maria’s family is depicted as being British although the actual family is from Spain.) The film also understates the loss of life. Rows and rows of body bags lined up on an airport tarmac and a few injured individuals lying on the side of the road don’t come close to representing the magnitude of human lives lost in this natural disaster. Although filmmakers censored the portrayal of death in this film, they didn’t edit out several scenes of female frontal nudity. While some of the scenes make sense in the context of the story, others don’t.

Still in the middle of unbelievable devastation and mayhem are incredible moments of courage and compassion. After Maria and Lucas are rescued from a tree and brought to a local village, a gray-haired woman not only tends Maria’s wounds but comforts the injured woman who can’t speak the local language. Later a group of survivors huddles together at a bus shelter, many of them protectively hoarding the last precious bits of battery life on their cell phones. But others (Sönke Möhring), in the midst of their own tragedy and pain, graciously offer their phones to strangers.

These heroic moments become the redeeming elements in this story of incredible survival. While the terrifying depiction of the tidal wave and the resulting devastation make this movie inappropriate for young viewers, adults and the oldest of teens will likely be inspired by the tenacity of the human spirit that still surfaces in the face of unimaginable calamity.

Release Date: 21 December 2012 (limited) Opens wider in 2013

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Kerry Bennett

The impossible rating & content info.

Why is The Impossible rated PG-13? The Impossible is rated PG-13 by the MPAA for intense realistic disaster sequences, including disturbing injury images and brief nudity.

Violence: A dirty, churning wave of water engulfs the guests and employees of a resort. Debris in the water causes serious injuries. Numerous bloody wounds, bruises, gashes and cuts are depicted. A screaming woman clings to a tree in the middle of torrent before being pulled under water. A desperate mother calls for her son. A crying child is found under debris. Dead bodies and large-scale destruction caused by a tsunami are shown. An injured woman is dragged through debris by her rescuers. Injured people are seen along the roadside. A hospital is flooded with patients. Women choke, coughing up blood and refuse from their lungs. A woman grows increasingly sick from her wounds. A man searches through rows and rows of dead bodies lying on an airport tarmac. Bloody or injured characters search for their missing loved ones. Children are rounded up and shipped away in trucks. Other scenes of death and devastation are portrayed.

Sexual Content: A woman’s breast and nipple are exposed as she changes clothes. Later her breast is exposed when her shirt is torn off during her struggle in the water and when her clothes are cut off in the hospital. Some buttock nudity is briefly seen.

Language: The script contains only a handful of mild profanities and terms of Deity.

Alcohol / Drug Use: Social drinking is shown with dinner.

Page last updated July 17, 2017

The Impossible Parents' Guide

Why does Maria want to help a little lost child even if it puts their lives in danger? How do others risk their own safety or comfort to help strangers? Why does Maria encourage Lucas to help at the hospital? How does that change his attitude? How do people assist others in spite of the language barriers?

What are some of the realities of dealing with a disaster of this magnitude? What are the immediate needs of survivors? How easy would it be to reunite families—especially children? What kinds of long-term aid would be needed in a disaster area? Is it easy to forget about those needs once the television cameras leave an area and move on to the next big news story?

To learn more about the 2004 Tsunami and the earthquake that started it, see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Indian_Ocean_earthquake_and_tsunami

The most recent home video release of The Impossible movie is April 23, 2013. Here are some details…

Home Video Notes: The Impossible

Release date: 23 April 2013

The Impossible releases to home video (Blu-ray-DVD Combo Pack) with the following extras:

-Audio commentary with director J.A. Bayona, writer Sergio G. Sánchez and producer Belén Atienza and María Belón

- Two featurettes

- Deleted scenes

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Rotten Tomatoes Confirms That Mission: Impossible Is One Of The Best Trilogies Ever Just Not The One You Think

Modern Mission: Impossible trilogy solidified as one of the best action trilogies ever made by Rotten Tomatoes.
Tom Cruise-led movies dominate the list, showcasing Mission: Impossible's rise to surpass contemporary franchises like Bond.
Rebecca Ferguson's Ilsa Faust storyline in the last three films reshaped the franchise into an elite trilogy.

Rotten Tomatoes' list of the top 300 movies ever made solidifies the prestige of the modern Mission: Impossible trilogy. Since making its first installment under the direction of Brian De Palma ( Carrie , The Untouchables ) in 1996, the Mission: Impossible film series has gradually solidified itself as one of the most exceptional action spy franchises of all time. Given the success and critical acclaim of the Bond franchise under Daniel Craig , Mission: Impossible has historically been placed in its shadow until its most recent installments made it resounding clear that Tom Cruise's Mission: Impossible could do more than just compete.

The best Mission: Impossible movies have also been the best movies of their respective years, with 2018's Mission: Impossible – Fallout setting a franchise high with a 97% critic score on Rotten Tomatoes. The Mission: Impossible films of the 2010s have undeniably gotten better with age, much like its seemingly superhuman star actor Cruise, who at the age of 61 is still doing his own stunts. The future of the Mission: Impossible franchise looks uncertain if Cruise departs after the highly anticipated Mission: Impossible 8 (formerly Dead Reckoning Part Two ), considering he is the face and soul of the series.

10 Biggest Details & Reveals From Mission: Impossible 8's Set Photos & Videos

The various forms of behind the scenes content for Mission: Impossible 8 has already provided some major clues for the highly anticipated sequel.

Rogue Nation, Fallout, and Dead Reckoning Are A Great Movie Trilogy, According To Rotten Tomatoes

Dead reckoning is listed as number 61 on top 300 list.

According to Rotten Tomatoes, the modern Mission: Impossible trilogy is not only one of the greatest action trilogies ever made but also one of the best movie trilogies of all time.

The last three Mission: Impossible films, Rogue Nation (2015), Fallout (2018), and Dead Reckoning (2023), all rank in Rotten Tomatoes list of the top 300 movies ever made. They are the only films of the Mission: Impossible franchise to be included on this list , and one of the few trilogies out of the 300 elite movies. The highest on the list was Dead Reckoning, earning the 61st overall spot. Other trilogies in the top 300 include Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings , Richard Linklater's Before trilogy starring Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy, and all four of the Toy Story movies.

According to Rotten Tomatoes, the modern Mission: Impossible trilogy is not only one of the greatest action trilogies ever made but also one of the best movie trilogies of all time. By comparison, Casino Royale (2006) just barely cracked the Top 50% at 149th overall . Fallout ranked right behind Dead Reckoning in the 71st position, while Rogue Nation snuck in at the 269th spot. Of course, it can be argued that these three Mission: Impossible movies are not a "true" film trilogy since they are part of a larger franchise that also includes Ghost Protocol (2011) and the upcoming Mission: Impossible 8 (2025).

This 20-Year-Old Tom Cruise Movie Can Lay The Blueprint For His Future After Mission: Impossible

Tom Cruise wont be able to do Mission: Impossible movies forever, but one of his old movies may have paved the way for his acting future.

Mission: Impossible's Last 3 Films Are Better Than Anything Else In The Franchise

Rogue nation was the launching pad for the latest outstanding installments.

While the positioning of the three Mission: Impossible films on the RT 300 list is certainly up for debate, Rogue Nation , Fallout , and Dead Reckoning all deserve to be a part of it.

The last three films of the Mission: Impossible franchise are a trilogy for Rebecca Ferguson's character Ilsa Faust , who was first introduced in Rogue Nation . Faust started out as an antagonist who became Ethan Hunt's ally and eventual romantic interest before she was given a more team-player role and killed off in Dead Reckoning . Ferguson undoubtedly played a major role in the gradual success of the franchise, becoming one of the essential characters in Fallout which also featured a dastardly Henry Cavill as a double agent. She is not set to return in the next Mission: Impossible installment.

While the positioning of the three Mission: Impossible films on the RT 300 list is certainly up for debate, as is the case with many of their selections for that matter, Rogue Nation , Fallout , and Dead Reckoning all deserve to be a part of it. The first Mission: Impossible received mostly positive reviews, while the second installment appeared to be steering the franchise in the wrong direction, earning a score of just 56% on RT. Mission: Impossible III featured a strong villain in Philip Seymour Hoffman, but it wasn't until Ghost Protocol and Rogue Nation that the franchise truly found its stride , improving ever since.

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Mission: impossible 8 could create an impressive tetralogy.

Dead Reckoning once again raised the bar for Mission: Impossible movies, which makes the expectations for Mission: Impossible 8 seemingly insurmountable. Based on the recent track record of M:I films, if the 2025 installment isn't one of the greatest movies of all time, it will essentially fall below expectations . Cruise and writer/director Christopher McQuarrie have given no reason to doubt their handling of the franchise, and Mission: Impossible 8 has all the ingredients to become another major filmmaking achievement. Unlike other standalone Mission: Impossible projects, it will be directly linked to Dead Reckoning , and could create an elite tetralogy.

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Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning

Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning is an action-adventure spy thriller from director Christopher McQuarrie. It's the seventh entry in the Mission: Impossible series and a direct sequel to Mission: Impossible Fallout. The title will star Tom Cruise, Simon Pegg, Rebecca Ferguson, and Ving Rhames.

Director Christopher McQuarrie

Release Date July 12, 2023

Studio(s) TC Productions, Skydance

Distributor(s) Paramount Pictures

Writers Christopher McQuarrie

Cast Haley Atwell, Pom Klementieff, Henry Czerny, Shea Whigham, Simon Pegg, Rebecca Ferguson, Rob Delaney, Esai Morales, Tom Cruise, Ving Rhames, Vanessa Kirby, Cary Elwes

Rating PG-13

Runtime 164 minutes

Genres Action, Crime, Adventure

Franchise(s) Mission: Impossible

Sequel(s) Mission: Impossible 8

prequel(s) Mission: Impossible - Fallout, Mission: Impossible, Mission: Impossible II, Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation, Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol, Mission: Impossible III

Budget $290 Million

Rotten Tomatoes Confirms That Mission: Impossible Is One Of The Best Trilogies Ever Just Not The One You Think

Chris Pratt Compares The Garfield Movie to Mission: Impossible Franchise

The Garfield Movie star Chris Pratt believes the stakes in the animated film mirror that of the Mission: Impossible film series.

The Garfield Movie teases higher stakes than the comics featuring the eponymous cat. Star Chris Pratt goes one step further, likening the action in the animated film to a Mission: Impossible movie.

Speaking on the Inside Total Film podcast, Pratt suggested the heist antics The Garfield Movie chronicles mirror the Mission: Impossible film series, particularly the "third act." Pratt believes the chase sequences and set pieces have some similarities to Tom Cruise's spy franchise, putting a new spin on Garfield and his band of characters. "It feels like a Mission: Impossible movie, especially when you get into the third act with these massive chase sequences and set pieces. It’s beautiful. The comic strip has always focused on Garfield’s perfectly pampered life – hating Mondays, loving lasagna – but the story here is about his scruffy street cat father (his biological dad Vic) which forces Garfield and Odie to explore this epic outdoor life. They are plucked from their perfectly pampered lives and taken on this hilarious high-stakes heist which plays like a Mission: Impossible movie ," Pratt said.

Chris Pratt Addresses Potential Reunion With Scarlett Johansson in Jurassic World 4

Pratt also expressed excitement working alongside fellow Marvel Cinematic Universe star Samuel L. Jackson, who plays Vic in The Garfield Movie. While they have starred in multiple MCU movies together as Star-Lord and Nick Fury, getting to work more intimately in The Garfield Movie with Jackson feels special to Pratt. "It’s so epic. Honestly, he might be the GOAT [greatest of all time]. I’ve always wanted to work with him, so it’s nice to be adjacent. We have been in the same films together, but he’s never played my father, so, here we go," he said.

Garfield Returns to the Big Screen

The Garfield Movie centers around the Monday-hating, lasagna-loving cat who unexpectedly reunites with Vic, a scruffy street cat who lures him into a high-stakes heist that risks everything. Also featuring Harvey Guillén (Odie), Hannah Waddingham (Jinx), Ving Rhames (Otto), Nicholas Hoult (Jon Arbuckle) and Calvin "Snoop Dogg" Broadus (Snoop Catt), The Garfield Movie comes 20 years after the most notable feature-length project based on the comic book character, Garfield: The Movie , which starred Bill Murray and became a box-office hit despite negative reviews.

Garfield's Insatiable Love of Lasagna, Explained

Since its international release on May 3, The Garfield Movie has grossed $49 million worldwide. However, the film has generated mixed critical reviews (52% on Rotten Tomatoes), with many calling it a run-of-the-mill movie lacking story and intrigue. Pratt has also garnered mixed feedback on his Garfield voice, which was partially inspired by his Parks and Recreation character.

Mark Dindal directed The Garfield Movie , which is based on the popular comic strip by Jim Davis. The film will also spawn a video game, which is expected to debut later this year.

The Garfield Movie opens in U.S. cinemas on May 24.

Source: Inside Total Film via GamesRadar+

The Garfield Movie

Garfield is about to go on a wild outdoor adventure. After an unexpected reunion with his long-lost father - the cat Vic - Garfield and Odie are forced to abandon their pampered life to join Vic in a hilarious, high-stakes heist.

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Nikki Glaser Reacts to Tom Brady’s Regret Over Roast Jokes Upsetting His Kids: ‘It’s Impossible to Me He Didn’t Consider What Could’ve Happened’

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Nikki Glaser said during a recent interview on “Today With Hoda & Jenna” that it’s clear Tom Brady “maybe didn’t consider the backlash from his family and how it would affect them” when he signed up to get roasted in a Netflix live comedy event. Brady has admitted as much , saying on “The Pivot Podcast” that he probably would not do another roast because of how the jokes affected his children. Glaser was widely considered one of the best comedians to roast Brady during the event.

Popular on Variety

Glaser was one of many comedians who roasted Brady over his divorce to Gisele Bündchen, who started a relationship with her jiu-jitsu instructor after her marriage ended.

“Tom Brady. Five-time Super Bowl MVP, most career wins, most career touchdowns,” Glaser quipped during the roast. “You have seven rings — well, eight, now that Gisele gave hers back. The only thing dumber than saying yes to this roast was when you said, ‘Hey babe, you should try jiu-jitsu.’”

While Brady did not specify on “The Pivot Podcast” which jokes upset his children, many viewers assume it was those targeting his relationship with Bündchen. The NFL icon has three children, one son with Bridget Moynahan and a son and a daughter with Bündchen.

“It makes you in some ways a better parent going through it,” Brady continued. “Sometimes you’re naive. You don’t know … I’m going to be a better parent as I go forward because of it. At the same time, I’m happy everyone who was there had a lot of fun. If we’re not laughing about things, we’re crying.”

During a post-roast interview on “The Howard Stern Show,” Glaser revealed that some of the roast jokes she had planned for Brady were cut from her set. One of the jokes was about Brady’s alleged plastic surgery.

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Four girls stabbed at amc theater in massachusetts, suspect arrested, ‘emilia pérez’ review: jacques audiard’s musical is crazy, but also a marvel – cannes film festival.

By Stephanie Bunbury

Stephanie Bunbury

‘Emilia Pérez’ Cannes Film Festival Premiere Photos: Édgar Ramírez, Selena Gomez, Zoe Saldana & More

‘Emilia Pérez’ Review: Jacques Audiard’s Musical Is Crazy, But Also A Marvel – Cannes Film Festival

Enter Manita Del Monte, the leader of a criminal cartel, for his future life. Manita has unthinkable amounts of money stashed in Swiss bank accounts but still likes to hang with his homies, drinking on old car seats somewhere out in the desert while his beloved children dance with his posse of killers. Nobody would mistake him for a woman. His voice is rasping, his beard disheveled and his approach to recruitment strikingly direct: he has his hombres put a bag over Rita’s head and kidnap her. Discretion must be enforced, given Manita’s incendiary secret. He has always wanted to be a woman. Now, having seen how resourceful Rita is in court, he wants her to help set him up with a sex change.

RELATED: ‘Emilia Pérez’ Starring Zoe Saldaña And Selena Gomez Scores 11-Minute Ovation At Cannes World Premiere

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Audiard has always worked very deliberately across genres; he followed the urban thriller The Beat My Heart Skipped with Rust and Bone , a relationship drama, then took on the Western in The Sisters Brothers . In 2016 he won the Palme D’Or with Dheepan , a sympathetic slice of social realism about illegal immigrants. The musical is a deceptively rigorous form, trammeled by its inherent artificiality. People don’t usually burst into song in the street, still less while discussing possible procedures at a Thai plastic surgery clinic. Emilia even manages to muster a song from beneath several layers of post-operative bandaging.

None of this ever seems ridiculous, however, because Audiard leans into its conventions; rather than bending his provocative story to fit it, he bends the form itself. From the very beginning, when we see the lights of Mexico City dissolve into fairy lights around the sombreros of a mariachi band, there are visual evocations of the glitter and glamor of musical theatre; we often find ourselves gazing at the stars, a brief respite from the drama. Dance numbers might begin in the office, continue in a black neutral space as the scenery magically fades away, then return to the real. Songs are delivered in snatches rather than as whole numbers, merging into dialogue and often barely sung at all. The sparkle never outshines the essential seriousness of the subject.

That subject is a tragic one. Even with a new face, body, identity and sense of mission, Emilia Pérez will never leave her other selves behind. The performances encompass that thematic depth. Saldaña brings warmth and a sense of solidity to Rita, guiding us through the plot’s giddying excesses; Karla Sofía Gascón is appropriately larger than life as both the monstrous cartel boss and as Emilia, a born-again woman with the proud demeanor of a ship’s figurehead. Gomez, as her cast-off wife determined to live her best life, brings that unmistakable Disney zing. The greatest plaudits, however, go to Jacques Audiard. It may be too soon to call the Palme d’Or with a week of the Cannes Film Festival left to run, but Emilia Pérez looks very much like a winner.

Title: Emilia Pérez Festival: Cannes (Competition) Director: Jacques Audiard Cast: Adriana Paz, Edgar Ramirez , Mark Ivanir, Zoe Saldaña, Karla Sofía Gascón, Selena Gomez Sales agent: The Veterans Running time: 2 hr 10 min

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Mission: Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part Two

The 8th entry in the long running Mission Impossible franchise. The 8th entry in the long running Mission Impossible franchise. The 8th entry in the long running Mission Impossible franchise.

Christopher McQuarrie
Bruce Geller
Erik Jendresen
Hannah Waddingham
Vanessa Kirby

Ethan Hunt's 'Impossible' Stunt? Taking a Nap

The White Widow

Secretary Of Defence Bernstein

Jasper Briggs

Luther Stickell

Eugene Kittridge

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Trivia Production on the 7th and 8th installments were planned to be filmed back to back. This changed after the 7th completed filming, due to Tom Cruise having to leave to do promotion for the Top Gun sequel, " Top Gun: Maverick (2022) ".
Connections Follows Mission: Impossible (1996)
Soundtracks The Mission: Impossible Theme Written by Lalo Schifrin
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