The Reel Review
On December 26, 2004, the world’s deadliest natural disaster of the 21st century, a massive tsunami triggered by a magnitude 9.2 earthquake off the west coast of the Indonesian island of Sumatra, killed more than 227 thousand people in Indian Ocean coastal communities in 14 countries. This National Geographic documentary recaps the chronology of events of this catastrophic moment in modern history.
Daniel Bogado, director of the Emmy Award-winning 9/11: One Day in America, again takes an immersive look at the events of that fateful day, as told by some of the survivors who lived through it. The four-part miniseries blends harrowing home videos of the tsunami with one-on-one interviews, some with individuals in those same home videos. We see how the tragedy unfolded in Indonesia, Thailand’s beach locales of Phuket and the Phi Phi Islands, and Sri Lanka. The common theme – just how quickly the tsunami waters appeared, catching most people completely by surprise. Waiting to learn the fate of each surviving interviewee’s loved ones in the miniseries is spellbinding, echoing how random circumstances determined life or death.
Graphics illustrate how quickly the devastating tsunami spread throughout the Indian Ocean after the enormous earthquake, the most powerful ever recorded in Asia. The video of the Sri Lankan passenger train moving along the nation’s southwest coast, its engineers unaware of the rapidly approaching tsunami, is chilling and unforgettable. When the tsunami knocked the train off its tracks, more than 1,700 of its 1,950 passengers died, making it the worst railway disaster in history. The tsunami was 10 feet above the top of the train.
The miniseries also talks with experts who saw the natural disaster unfold in real time – a seismologist from the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center in Hawaii who resorted to landline phone calls to warn affected countries at a time when the Indian Ocean had no equivalent warning center. (It does now.) The two final episodes focus on CNN journalists who gradually figured out that Banda Aceh, Indonesia was the worst hit, since there had been zero contact from anyone there following the earthquake, and ordinary tsunami survivors, who, in the aftermath, rose to the occasion to become unsung heroes helping others in need. It is very moving.
REEL FACTS
• After the initial quake, aftershocks of up to magnitude 7.2 continued to shake the region daily for three to four months.
• The tsunami reached heights of nearly 100 feet on the west coast of Sumatra, 20 to 33 feet in the Thai resort town of Khao Lak, up to 20 feet in parts of Phuket, and from 16 to 30 feet in Sri Lanka.
• The raising of the sea floor from the massive earthquake produced a permanent .1 millimeter rise in the sea level of the Indian Ocean.
Video & Photo
