It's hard to imagine two spots on the planet with more to fear from Mother Nature than Northern California and the amazingly beautiful slice of Norwegian mountains and fjords that is the setting for The Wave, the intimate natural-disaster film from director Roar Uthaug, scripted by John Kare Raake and Harald Rosenlow-Eeg.
The story kicks off with a going-away party for middle-aged geologist Kristian (Kristoffer Joner), who's packing his little family �" wife, small daughter and restless teenage son �" for the stimulating culture of Oslo. The only fault to be found with this special-effects-laden drama, Norway's official Oscar Foreign-Language entry �" it didn't make the cut �" is how slowly Uthaug gets to his main story. Once the dam bursts, so to speak, we're off to the races, and only the most subtitle-resistent could possibly object to the truly suspenseful drama. Especially concerning the fate of the son, who disappears for too long a stretch in the early second-act chaos.
This is a film with a sound geological underpinning. The trouble begins when a large rock-mass falls into a fjord, creating a monster 300-foot tsunami, giving the scattered residents of the tiny fishing village of Geiranger only a few precious moments to flee. According to the film's production notes, disasters like this occur roughly every half-century or so. The Wave specifically draws on the details of a rock-slide-caused tsunami incident that destroyed a small village in 1934, leaving 40 dead.
Unlike early-1950s disaster flicks from abroad in American drive-ins and on 12-inch TVs, The Wave doesn't insult our intelligence by constructing an orgy of destruction around an American B-movie actor. In the infamous if campy-fun Japanese Godzilla: King of the Monsters, a pre-Perry Mason Raymond Burr was dropped into Tokyo-on-fire as if he were a space alien. American viewers of The Wave may find that the geologist and his family are a bit stolid, refusing to hit the panic-now style of hysterical acting favored by our version of the genre. The hero Kristian is, in truth, a man whose vast knowledge of his field has left him rather emotionally unprepared when the threat becomes all too real.
Part of one's enjoyment of this film is its makers' refusal to bow to some trumped-up supernatural or religious reason for a world suddenly coming apart. But in truth, much of the pleasure does derive from the same element that propelled the vastly more expensive 2004 "end of the world" spectacle The Day After Tomorrow �" namely, will they save the "cute kid," Tomorrow 's Jake Gyllenhaal or The Wave 's Jonas Hoff Oftebro as Sondre? The Wave doesn't seek to justify its 100 minutes of screen time with environmental boogeymen tactics. Its makers are content to say you never know what lies around the corner, and it's all good clean fun �" as long as it's happening to some other overcivilized tribe, half-a-world away.