The Reel Review
A Norwegian family on their annual Canary Islands Christmas vacation on the resort island of La Palma must flee for their lives after a young Norwegian geologist discovers an imminent volcanic eruption, which causes an earthquake and a massive, deadly tsunami, in this Netflix disaster melodrama miniseries.
So nevermind that the physics is all wrong – an earthquake on La Palma would cause a tsunami everywhere ELSE – the ridiculous story melds an impressive array of human personal problems into a cavalcade of natural disasters. A relatively dry first episode establishes the various characters in the series – a traumatized geologist and her brother, whose parents died in the December 2004 tsunami in Thailand, and a family whose parents are having marital problems as the daughter struggles with her sexuality and self-confidence when not watching over her brother who’s on the autism spectrum. You know – normal everyday life set to an incredible backdrop of never-ending natural disasters.
The real fun starts at the end of Episode One – when a deadly volcanic poisonous gas emission threatens to kill nearby tent campers and the investigating geologists – one played by Scandinavian go-to actor Ólafur Darri Ólafsson (Somebody Somewhere, Operation Napoleon, Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga, The Meg) and the other by Thea Sofie Loch Naess (The Last Kingdom, Arctic Void). Eventually the volcano erupts full-on, shooting lava and ash high enough into the atmosphere to cause a deadly plane crash, then an earthquake and then – finally! – a massive tsunami that takes out yet another plane trying to take off. As disaster entertainment goes, this silly miniseries, while unintentionally comical with the string of disasters endured by this poor family, is at least sort of entertaining in a bizarre, train wreck (hey another disaster!) sort of way. PS: There is NO WAY anyone on that plane would survive that tsunami.
REEL FACTS
• Harald Rosenlow-Eeg, one of the writers of La Palma, also was a writer for the 2015 Norwegian disaster film The Wave.
• A 2001 academic study suggested that the collapse of the volcanic island of La Palma could result in 80-foot-high mega-tsunami along the east coasts of North and South America. Research since then has indicated that a worst-case scenario would actually be a storm surge of three to seven feet. La Palma last erupted in 2021.
• With about 14 million visitors per year and a population of 2.2 million, the Canary Islands is the most populous archipelago of Macaronesia, which also includes the ten-island nation of Cape Verde and the Portuguese island territories of Madeira and the Azores.
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