'The Wave': Supersize disaster flick from Norway

A Hollywood-size disaster movie from the puny, badly funded Scandinavian film industry? The idea seems laughable.

If there's one thing Americans can do well, it's gigantonormous action flicks about fire-belching volcanoes, speeding meteors, alien invasions, and mutant flying sharks. We've even managed to disasterize biblical stories - Exodus: Gods and Kings has more in common with The Poseidon Adventure than it does with The Greatest Story Ever Told.

So, given the odds against him, props are due to Norway's Roar Uthaug, director of The Wave, a thrilling, gorgeous actioner about a massive tsunami that wipes a tourist town off the map.

The film is set in Geiranger, a hamlet next to a bluer-than-blue fjord in Norway's Sunnmøre region. Despite its breathtaking vistas, this town has been courting disaster for centuries: Above the fjord looms Åkerneset mountain, an unstable pile of rubble.

When millions of tons of rock tumble off the mountain into the fjord, the water displacement causes a 40-foot-high tsunami. Death, disaster, and heartache follow.

The Wave calls on every disaster-movie trope, yet manages to inject a little European soul into the proceedings. A little soul and a lot of patience.

Uthaug's movie builds at a slow, steady burn. A good half of the picture is spent on the attempts of its hero, a geologist named Kristian (Kristoffer Joner), to forestall the inevitable - at least until he can warn complacent officials and townspeople that their lives are in danger.

Uthaug, who won accolades from horror fans with his tremendous 2006 slasher, Cold Prey, isn't all that keen to give us unique or particularly deep individuals. Unlike last year's superb Swedish thriller Force Majeure, which used an avalanche as an occasion to examine the human psyche, The Wave is thin when it comes to character work. Kristian and his family - hotel-worker wife Idun (Ane Dahl Torp), moody son Sondre (Jonas Hoff Oftebro), and cutie-pie daughter Julia (Edith Haagenrud-Sande) - all are stock characters.

But they're immensely likable, and unlike the stars of American disaster pics, they're not closet superheroes.

The Wave also succeeds because it's plausible. As scientific and news reports make clear at the film's start, Norway's mountains are highly unstable: Deadly rock slides have hit in the past and are expected to occur again.

Take this realism, mix it with solid CGI effects, dazzling sound design, and an old-school orchestral score, and you have a winner.

tirdad@phillynews.com
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