THE WAVE (Roar Uthaug). Subtitled.105 minutes. See listing. Rating: NNN
See what Roar Uthaug can do with just $8 million and you’ll never again tolerate a disaster pic with a stupidly bloated budget.
Uthaug uses the dough to create a nail-biter of a story about a tsunami that hits a small Norwegian town. He succeeds by keeping the focus on the human story and not on a glut of CGI and still manages to deliver many gorgeous, long and pricey aerial shots of fjords.
The day before heading to a new job, Kristian (played by Norway’s biggest star, Kristoffer Joner), a geologist deeply attuned to nature, notices a blip in the computer data he’s been monitoring. As he makes his way to a new life, he senses danger back home and returns to his research station, predicting a cataclysmic tsunami. It happens, of course, crushing the hotel where his wife (Ane Dahl Torp) is still working.
This disaster flick ticks off all the boxes: the prophet no one believes, the threat to family (Kristian’s son doesn’t hear the siren alert because he’s skateboarding in the hotel basement wearing headphones), the secondary characters who don’t make it, several implausible plot points.
But Uthaug’s craft is exceptional, and his choice to focus on the small details rather than the monumental proportions of the catastrophe is smart. You can say a lot by showing just a few dead bodies floating on the water.
