Premiered at the Toronto Film Festival September 14, 2015
Plot(Spoiler Alert)
Kristian Eikjord, an experienced geologist, works on his last day with his colleagues before he leaves Geiranger and moves to Stavanger with his family. But before Kristian leaves, he discovers there may be a chance that a 80 meter high wave could come and hit Geiranger after a crack at Akneset mountain breaks. Kristian’s friends and family think he is over worked at first, but later during the night his prediction comes true. The alarms around town go off and everyone has ten minutes to make it up to higher ground before the wave hits. Kristian makes it up the mountain with his daughter. After the wave hits, Kristian leaves Julia with a friend of his, while he goes looking for the rest of the family, Idun and Sondre, who are still down in Geiranger.
Blaine: There are so many disaster movies that Hollywood has made, but it was a first time for Norway when they made “The Wave”. And “The Wave” is something that is sort of based on fact.
There is a crack in the Akneset mountains and everyone in Norway believes it’ll collapse, but they don’t know when. The writers of “The Wave”, John Kare Raake and Harald Rosenlow-Eeg decided to write a story of a disaster just waiting to happen. Director Roar Uthaug came on board after he was given a 1930’s article by one of the producers of the film, where there were several instances of these rockslides into the fjord creating tsunamis. Roar was also informed that a script was being put together about the crack in Geirangerfjord that keeps expanding each year. Roar and the writers would have to figure out how the story would go and it took two years for them to work on the script. While the script was in works, Roar and the writers visited the place where they would be shooting and talked to the geologists there to get whatever info they needed.
“The Wave takes place in a small tourist town just bellow Akerneset and that’s where shooting took place. Most of the people who live there were asking if it was really necessary to make a disaster movie of a giant wave hitting their town. The extras of the film are the local people of that town and they loved being apart of this project. The cast and crew would shoot some scenes where the people are trying to run up the hill close to 12:30 in the morning. Eighty five extras would arrive at a hotel at five o’clock in the morning and work like there was no tomorrow. They would shoot a lot of outdoors stuff in Geiranger and then they would shoot at a set in Romania of the damage the wave causes to Geiranger after it hits.
Actors Kristoffer Joner and Ane Dahl Torp, who play the married couple, Kristian and Idun, have worked with each other before and one of the things that drew Ane to the project was working with Kristoffer again because they get along so well. Ane, Kristoffer and Jonas Hoff Oftebro, who plays their son, had to practice holding their breath underwater for three or five minutes. They took lessons from a diving instructor. Ane and Kristoffer also did their own stunts even though they had stunt people as their doubles, but they felt they were capable of doing the stunts themselves. They even did a great job of accomplishing swimming under water. Ane was brave enough to do all these things on her own because she doesn’t like the water or holding her breath underwater, but she did it for director Roar Uthaug, whom she trusted very much.
In script it said that Ane Dahl Torp’s character, Idun, killed a man by drowning him because he tried to drown her son. Ane asked Roar how would she be able to drown a man who is a bit bigger than her. They would practice how it would work in the pool and what they found out is that if she could hold her thighs and hold onto something, it could possibly work. Those underwater scenes were difficult for Ane because she was nervous of doing them. She and the others couldn’t get up and get air whenever they wanted and there were tight spots on the set. Thankfully it wasn’t that big of a problem while they were shooting.
My rating on “The Wave” is five out of five stars.
Blaine: There’s a shot in “The Wave" of Kristian sitting down and looking out the window and it looks like he’s looking at a very detailed painting.
