After the debacle of 2009’s remake of The Poseidon Adventure, simply called Poseidon, Hollywood decided to cool its heels from making any more multimillion dollar disaster epics and concentrated on making some pretty high-budget disasters in their own right (can you say last year’s Ghostbusters remake?)
When it comes to disaster movies, here’s the basic setup: you introduce the setting, the characters, albeit briefly, and bring in the natural disaster, and then move the survivors around like little chess pieces in elaborate settings where some people live and some people don’t survive. At some point, the big rescue happens and everyone, except the dead people, live happily after ever.
The country of Norway decided to dip their figurative toe in the water with the movie The Wave, which was inspired by a story of a rogue tsunami destroying a small town located in a fjord, which by the way has no way out.
What set The Wave apart from Poseidon were a few things: first, the absence of rich pretty people. The lead doesn’t look like he’s carved out of granite and buffed to a high sheen. He’s a burned-out geologist who’s on his way out of town. His wife seemed normal. Secondly, by not just creating cardboard cutout stock characters, we got to know the working class family before all hell broke loose. Third, the Norwegian film was budgeted at a paltry $5 million as opposed to Poseidon’s hefty price tag of $160 million. And finally, the dialogue was in Norwegian which means that we didn’t have to worry about the usual cringeworthy dialogue.
What was really exceptional was the creation of true tension in the film; yes, there was the initial rock slide that morphed into the tsunami, but they built in the ticking time bomb device by setting up that in the event of a Tsunami, the warning siren would let the citizens know that they had twelve minutes to get to higher ground before they would be washed away. When the siren went off, not only did the characters get swept up in the fear and the panic, but this reviewer did, too.
Where The Wave started to falter was maintaining momentum after the monstrous wave struck the tiny town. The tension dissipated to a great extent and while there was that moment where things might not turn out well for those needing to be saved… well, you can’t kill off family members. That would be too cruel.
The Wave had some truly spectacular camera work and the leads acquitted themselves nicely. It’s a great popcorn movie. Just be ready to read the subtitles.