Those gripes aside, the film is actually very successful. Director Juan Antonio Bayona (whose last film was Spanish horror The Orphanage) and his screenwriters grasp that the best way to convey something of the scale of the disaster is actually focus small, to view everything through the eyes of the one family separated by the waves and unsure if each other are alive or dead, and the emotions they go through and the sometimes questionable choices they make. Which is not to say that this is a small film - the moment when the tsunami hits and the immediate aftermath as Naomi Watts' mother and her eldest son are swept miles inland is one of the most powerful and bravura pieces of film-making you're likely to see this year.
In fact Bayona handles both the small emotional scenes and the big action ones with consumate skill, from the opening use of noise over a blank screen to create an atmosphere of apprehension. However, there is one emotional blow when mother and son have reached that hospital that I'm unsure of - I don't know if it was something that really happened to the Spanish family, but if invented by the film-makers feels like an emotional twist/manipulation for dramatic effect that the film doesn't really need.
The cast are also superb - Ewan McGregor more sympathetic and less irritating than he's been for a while and Watts is superb, but the real star is 16 year old Tom Holland who shoulders much of the emotional weight of the film in very convincing fashion. A great future awaits him if he continues like this.
Overall - 8/10 A very powerful, well acted and well put together film with an early contender for one of the sequences of the year.
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