| RATING: | 40% |
| FORMAT: | DVD |
[Impossible]
Ethnocentric Contextless Vacuum
As you would expect from Whites, this is the story of a true historical event told from the point-of-view of people who do not live locally to the event. As if a story of an earthquake in Los Angeles were to be told from the point-of-view of a family of Japanese tourists who just happen to be in California at the time.
This narcissism offers the audience no context with which to understand the tragedy from the point-of-view of those who suffer most and, therefore, no real means of understanding what is really happening. White solipsism restricts us to a gilded cage from which we witness events that make us grateful they have not happened to us from the comfort of knowing they never will. This places us affectively outside the action and, thus, somewhat disinterested and emotionally distant.
White self-absorption tells us more about Whites than about any other ethnicity; while never alluding to this central fact - the dramaturgical elephant in the room. This could be about any natural disaster, since there is no particularity in the enactment.
Unlike Hereafter, the tsunami here is central to the pseudo-drama and no issue is ever properly addressed. A mere catalyst there is the entire movie here - with no thematic development.
The acting is largely mediocre, but this is because there are no human insights for the actors to portray. A tourist travelogue of a disaster movie – with CGI effects - rather than an actual disaster movie: The Poseidon Adventure was much better in this respect. Without a story, the audience is left with overly-contrived melodramatic suspense, with no corollary analysis of what it is that makes a family tick despite the implication that this movie is all about the family unit, as such.
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