The Calm Beyond

As I happened to stumble upon the 2020 sci-fi thriller "The Calm Beyond" by random chance here in 2022, I must admit that I needed no persuasion to sit down and watch what writers Heather Gornall and Joshua Wong had to offer. I mean, a movie set in a devastated landscape of Hong Kong, that sounded more than promising.

But this movie was sort of a mess of a movie. Sure, the concept idea of having Hong Kong devastated by a massive tsunami was interesting, but then everything beyond that made little or no sense. Why would the water remain at that high level after a tsunami? Why wouldn't surviving people have been saved by, say, the mainlanders from China? Why would people resort to violence and such under such catastrophic circumstances? Where did all the food come from? And how could they go such a long time without rescue or anything, I mean, just look at the decayed corpses as it would indicate the amount of time that has passed.

I wanted to like the movie, I really, really did, but there was just too many things that made no logical sense and just made me question the whole concept and believability of the movie. So director Joshua Wong didn't really deliver a very impressive movie here.

Sure, the atmosphere of a devastated Hong Kong was interesting and nice to see, and they definitely managed to pull that off well enough. But it just couldn't make up for all the shortcomings and flaws in the movie.

One thing I didn't understand was why they had to speak English. English is not the native language in Hong Kong, and thus is made little sense.

The acting performances in the movie were actually good, and this was all new and unfamiliar faces on the cast list for me, aside from actor Terence Yin.

"The Calm Beyond" is a movie that came and went without much of a ruckus, and it will sink back into oblivion for me, because this movie was not outstanding or memorable.

My rating of "The Calm Beyond" lands on a three out of ten stars.

Lead actress is great, I like her a lot in this movie.

It has some interesting action sequences.

Sometimes during the movie you can see lead actress in situations before the disaster, I like that.

Decent movie. I enjoyed watching it.

I almost didnt watch this movie because of previous reviews. Glad I did, enjoyed it very much. Great acting/ writing & storyline. Gave it an 8 because its better than 80% better than most of the stuff Hollywood is putting out these days.

It's not too bad for a first full length feature film for short film, music video and TV commercials filmmaker Joshua Wong, but his lack of experience to create proper content to fill in a longer runtime is evident.

While the film's lead characters are sweet and entertaining, it isn't bringing anything new enough to the table. It feels somewhat confused about the story it's trying to tell, for the most part it's a sentimental story of family but then randomly throws in moments of tension and violence. The two don't go together smoothly here, and what you end up with is a relatively slow paced drama, set in a harsh world we know little about, with an emotional story which never digs very deep, and some cliched, minimally appearing bad guys.

With proper editing, this film should've had at least 30 mins cut out, and add more tense scenes, and trim down the mainly irrelevant long dragged out sappy scenes, and have more of the amazing dramatics we got in the last 10 mins of the film. The flashbacks were also poorly filmed, convoluted and all over the place.

The cinematography and score were decent, and the performances spot-on. It's a good attempt, with a failed result. All things considered, this film is not deserving of one's and twos, and clearly not worthy of anything above a seven, so it's a generous 6/10 from me.

A young woman survives a tsunami on the upper floors of a Hong Kong building while eating a seemingly endless supply of Ramen noodles. Several scenes show her boiling the noodles with fire. Bad guys constantly harass the feisty woman and a little girl joins the battle. Flashbacks show a traditional Chinese family arguing in Cantonese which had no subtitles in the version I watched. The characters speak mostly in English but it was still an annoyance. The ending is silly and I cannot recommend this film.