The Calm Beyond

When I read negative reviews such as seen prominently in this section. "Bored", "Doesn't make sense", "Stopped it at 30 minutes"... these people need to go back to their adrenaline-junkie, sex/blood face fests and take the jaded "doesn't understand cinema" reviews with them.

First let me state this does not warrant an "R" rating. I watched this without knowing the rating, then came here to IMDB and thought, "What? Is this another 'Matrix' where the producers force a rating on a film to supposedly get a larger audience?" This is PG-13 at the most. There's no F-bombs, only very minor nudity (from behind and brief, no details), and the "violence" scenes were intense but not graphic. I wouldn't call this a "family" film, but it's not going to scar an early teen. "Fake R ratings" are becoming more prominent. This is one of them.

Second: Why are there so many negative reviews? Simple answer: rather than enjoying the film, some people just live to complain... and in their haste often get it wrong.

One reviewer complained that the main actress speaking English made no sense. It makes sense if 1) It was intended primarily for an English-speaking audience and 2) A large number of Japanese, Chinese and Koreans are learning English as as second language in order to compete in International markets... and will often speak English even at home in order to practice. This was very well depicted in the home scenes in which both Japanese and English were spoken regularly-- the parent insisting on sticking to traditional language, with the "rebellious daughter" insisting on speaking English. But even the parents understood what she was saying. That's life in Asia in the age of Internet and cross-culture economies.

The same reviewer griped about absent rescue teams and 'why didn't people from other countries come help?'... evidently missing the very obvious point that this disaster was global and not local in nature. Now, some may argue that a global flood is not scientifically possible-- but that would be a huge debate all its own, with people taking both sides (after all, a large portion of the population believes a global flood already happened thousands of years ago). The entire theme of this was evidently based on an ecology going suddenly and severely wrong-- and there are no "other countries" that weren't affected that could come to Hong Kong's rescue. Similar theme of global disaster has been presented in many movies.

But the problem here is that some viewers seem to watch films just to pick them apart... and in doing so only show their lack of understanding of what's going on in the film. Many of the "negative reviews" exhibit exactly that.

It is rare that I give a film ten stars. But this film is near-perfect. Yes, it starts out very slow, with the main character seemingly involved in a lot of nonsensical activities. Those activities and the need for them become increasingly apparent as the film goes on. Viewers will totally miss those important-to-the-story explanations if they click out early.

The directing, acting, script, music and sets are superb. We at first wonder what is going on, but all is revealed as the film progresses and we find ourselves greatly empathizing with the characters.

The story is well-told. Some may ask "Why did she do that?" or "Why didn't she do this instead?"... but most people put in a similar situation likely would not manage as well, and wind up starving to death or dying of thirst. Very few of us have personal experience in drastic survival situations. I took the movie as presented: this is what she devised to survive. The viewer is not in position to judge her decisions.

The relationship between the woman and child develops slowly and very well. Brilliant job of directing and acting there. Throughout the film one didn't quite know how it was going to end up; the ending is as realistic as could be expected given the situation.

For the record I had nothing to do with the production of this film, am not a family member of staff, knew nothing about this film going in. But this is prime cerebral fiction, a disaster film that eliminates all the clichés of similar films and portrays a relatively slow, realistic daily existence in a dangerous environment setting. It is one of the best post-apocalyptic / disaster films I've seen to date.

One can't watch this for 20 or 30 minutes and decide to shut it down... and then presume to know enough about it to review it. The film has to be considered as a whole. This is a sleeper gem of a film, and science not-so-fiction at its best. There wasn't a single item I could put my finger on and say, "This was poorly done." That is very rare in any film. Solid ten stars for a solidly well-produced movie.

Although the film has been picked apart in some reviews, it is still an acceptable watch. Don't try and over think it, just suspend disbelief for awhile. I would have loved to see more films from Hong kong/Australian director Joshua Wong but sadly, he died recently from cancer at 42 years old. Rest in peace.

Post-apocalyptic stories, it's normally a plot I really enjoy watching, and in some way I was entertained, but mildly this time. The story just didn't make much sense in some scenes. Why would anybody be interested in that woman trying to survive? It's little things like that that make the story not very credible. The acting was okay, not great though. The lack of subtitles when they spoke in Chinese was also a big let down. There was already not much dialogues in this movie, so the little Chinese conversations should have been translated. I expected more from this movie.

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.

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.