MARCH 14, 2016
While almost everybody likes a disaster movie — c’mon, ‘fess up, you do too — I have a particular love for for a less widely-loved sub-genre: the big-wave movie.
While Irwin Allen’s “The Poseidon Adventure” (1972) is the gold-standard for big-wave cheesiness — it’s pure Velveeta through and through — I do have a certain fondness for tidal waves that decimate iconic cities. Whether it’s drowning Wall Street in “Deep Impact” (1998) or the Hollywood sign in “San Andreas” (2015) or the Golden Gate Bridge in just about every other big-wave movie, I sit in the movie theater just smitten.
Because of the high cost of this kind of disaster film, the big-wave movie is most associated with major Hollywood studios. But Norway has now shown with Roar Uthaug’s appropriately named “The Wave,” now making its way across the country, that you can capture the spirit of Irwin Allen at a fraction of the price.
“The Wave” doesn’t threaten an iconic city like Oslo (pity that) but instead targets a picture postcard-pretty town called Geiranger resting at the very tip of a gorgeous fjord. There really is a Geiranger, where in 1905 a rockslide occurred that drowned the town, resulting in a huge death toll. For some time, Norwegian geologists have warned that the real Geiranger is way overdue for another rockslide and tsunami, which may make “The Wave” a lot less entertaining in a few years.
Whereas a good part of Allen’s “Poseidon”-level budgets went to a parade of such big-name guest stars as Gene Hackman and Shelley Winters, Uthang takes a different tack, focusing instead on a small tightly-knit family — a geologist, Kristian (Kristoffer Joner, who is also currently on-screen in “The Revenant”), his wife Idun (Ane Dahl Torp) who works the night shift at the local tourist hotel, their skateboarding teenage son Sondre (Jonas Hoff Oftebro) and their impossibly adorable young daughter Julia (Edith Haagenrud-Sande).
“The Wave” is in Norwegian with English subtitles, but don’t let that put you off — it follows the disaster-movie playbook to a T, as comforting as a Sunday supper of meat loaf and mashed potatoes. As always, Act 1 is the set-up and character introduction, but here, there are so few key characters to introduce that the film can spend extra time letting us get to know them, and in Uthaug’s assured hands, care about them, which pays off big time farther down the road.
We meet Kristian just as he’s celebrating his last day (what are the odds?) of monitoring the geologic movements of the nearby mountain, and he’s ready to accept a sell-out job with an oil company (hisssss!!!) in the big city. However, as he leaves his office, there are some ominous rumblings on the mountain. About to drive onto the ferry with his kids to start his new life, Kristian has a classic “I have a bad feeling about this” moment and whips the SUV around to stave off what he’s sure is an impending catastrophe.
It will come as no surprise in a picture called “The Wave” that Act 2 stars….the wave. Given the film’s comparatively small budget, its wave is obviously digital, but it’s a pretty good one, nonetheless, with the hoards of screaming villagers trying in vain to run away a nice added touch.
I’ll give nothing away, but Act 3 suddenly changes from being a big-wave movie to a tsunami movie. Yes, both genres have a big wave, but, trust me, they are very very different. When the wave hits in a big-wave movie, a few model buildings are destroyed, a couple of stuntmen fall from collapsing buildings, the hero (or heroine) finds the rest of the family and saves them from imminent death. Big hugs all around. The End. Fun.
Not in a tsunami movie, the most recent examples of which are Clint Eastwood’s “Hereafter” and the Naomi Watts-starrer “The Impossible,” whose structure “The Wave” most resembles. There’s rubble and debris and bodies and suffering, not at all fun, as our hero searches in hopes of finding his family or loved one alive. It can be moving or suspenseful, as it is here, but fun it ain’t.
Still, “The Wave” delivers on its disaster-movie promise, no small achievement in this icy winter of dud movies. And I guarantee that you’ll never look at a picturesque fjord the same way again.
GRADE: B
