YMMV / The Impossible

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• Aluminium Christmas Trees: The movie is Based on a True Story and everyone in the family both survived and were reunited the way it's shown in the film. According to María Belón "the biggest lie in the movie" is that the real ball was yellow, not red.
• Award Snub: Tom Holland not getting an Oscar nomination and Naomi Watts not winning for Best Actress, even though both were a long shot.
• Broken Base: The film got heavy criticism for choosing to make the protagonists a white family despite the disaster happening in Thailand and affecting mainly Thai people. Others, including several survivors, protested these criticisms.
  "Had this film been purely about the tale of a western middle class family's 'ruined' holiday then I would have agreed. For me, it was the exact opposite. Rather than concentrating on the 'privileged white visitors', the film portrayed the profound sense of community and unity that I experienced in Thailand, with this family at the centre of it. Both for my (then) 16-year-old self and the Belón family, it was the Thai people who waded through the settled water after the first wave had struck to help individuals and families... The Thai people had just lost everything – homes, businesses, families – yet their instinct was to help the tourists."
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Tom Holland, at only fifteen years old, has to carry a lot of scenes by himself as Lucas. Critics noted that he did excellently, coming close to stealing the spotlight from the veteran actors Ewan McGregor and Naomi Watts.
• Just Here for Godzilla: The film's main purpose is to try and avert this. The tsunami happens early in the story, and the majority of the plot involves a family trying to reunite.
• Nausea Fuel:
  • Maria puking a fishing line.
  • Maria's injuries after being swept around in the tsunami are pretty hard to watch.
• Retroactive Recognition: Lucas would eventually grow up to become Spider-Man.
• Spiritual Successor: Society of the Snow, another drama by director J.A. Bayona, based on a true story, that depicts a group of normal people trying to survive a sudden catastrophe in a exotic location far from their own home. Bayona even came across the book that Society of the Snow is based on while doing research for The Impossible.
• Visual Effects of Awesome. Not just the tsunami (which was a combination of CGI, an outdoor set and water tank and miniatures), but the make-up effects for the injuries are disturbingly realistic. What else can you expect from make-up team Montse Ribé and David Martí.

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