Miniseries review: Tsunami, The Aftermath (HBO)
12/10/06 10:52 AM
By ED BARK
It struck on the day after Christmas, 2004, taking the lives of more than a quarter million people caught in the clutches of an out-of-the-blue flash flood.
HBO's Tsunami, The Aftermath affectingly telescopes the human toll via a small group of fictional characters whose stories are drawn from true accounts. It builds very slowly over two Sundays (Dec. 10th and 17th at 7 p.m. central), requiring considerable patience and dedication during this otherwise most wonderful time of the year. Splitting the three hour, 15 minute drama into two parts a week apart won't make it any easier to stay the course. HBO would have been wiser to trim the running time by a half-hour or so and then unfold this drama in one sitting.
Filmed in Phuket and Khao Lak, Thailand, Tsunami isn't your typical boom-crash broadcast network disaster epic. Very little time and money are spent on special effects, with shaky, hand-held camera footage fleetingly used to suggest the devastation at large. The point of the story is what follows. And for the purposes of this drama, no one is more haunted or heartbroken than Ian Carter (Chiwetel Ejiofor), who stayed ashore with his six-year-old daughter, Martha (Jazmyn Mabaso), while wife Susie (Sophie Okonedo) joined a few other vacationers on a boat trip.
Ian survives but is separated from his daughter after she slips out of his hands. Little Martha is last seen clutching onto a tree. Did she survive? The Carters' desperate search for her, with Ian shouldering enormous guilt, gives Tsunami its overriding emotional pull. Next Sunday's Part 2 is especially compelling, with the couple both estranged and united by a shared grief.
The miniseries also stars Tim Roth as investigative journalist Nick Fraser, a hard-bitten hound whose editor primarily is interested in body counts. Toni Collette plays relief worker Kathy Graham, a junkie in times like these.
"Chaos is my natural habitat ... I'm having the best time of my life. Is that terrible?" she wonders.
There's also a young Thai survivor named Than (Samrit Machielsen), whose small coastal fishing village is wiped out. Developers quickly seize on the opportunity to bulldoze its remains and build another resort hotel. It's still paradise, after all, and people are quick to forget.
Tsunami, The Aftermath doesn't entirely come together, with some characters only minimally registering. As a whole it's not exactly a dynamic film. Instead we have an undeniably well-meant one, with the Carters' story making a lasting impact.
The miniseries will be repeated throughout December. In a couple of instances, it will be shown in its entirety on the same night (Dec. 23rd on HBO and Dec. 18th and 28th on HBO2.
Lest we forget, an estimated 227,073 people died in this tragedy, one-third of them children. More than 50,000 bodies have never been recovered. It already seems so long ago. In fact it wasn't.
Grade: B
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