Foreign

Disaster films are something that for me screams American cinema of the 90’s.  I know there were films before that had come out, but a good portion of my teen years of the 90’s were of the mega-blockbuster variety like Twister, Dante’s Peak, The Perfect Storm, and so forth.  Now we have The Wave, the first disaster film to come out of Norway, and from the looks of the trailers they were going for something BIG.  This is a film that comes out with so much potential and is a film that could even possibly find an American audience that could look past the fact that subtitles may be involved.  With the way technology has come along over the years, smaller countries have been able to produce films as big as anything released in our cinemas here in the states.  Now here’s the question: is it any good, though?

Welcome to the small mountain town of Geiranger, Norway.  It’s a quaint little town that attracts tourists with its isolation and beautiful landscape.  But having this little slice of vacation paradise comes at a price.  Geiranger sits in an area that has a lot of activity with the rocks moving beneath the surface, this movement geologists believe will one day cause a collapse of a mountain spilling into the fjord below which will create a massive Tsunami. Basically Geiranger is a town simply waiting to be wiped out by this massive wave.  This is where we meet Kristian (Kristoffer Joner), a geologist that has been studying Geiranger for years but is now moving away to the city for a “better job”.  It comes as no surprise that as he and his family are packing and ready to move that Kristian is troubled by recent recordings from around the area and has a feeling something bad is going to happen.  (One thing I’ve learned from disaster films, always listen to the nut job that believes the end is coming.)