Film - Survival Family

Watched on ANA return flight from Tokyo June 2017With the amount of politeness and respect between people in Tokyo, watching the opening scenes of this film featuring two spoilt brats shocked me at first. How can there be impolite teenagers in Tokyo? – I hadn’t seen any!I persevered to learn about the family; stressed parents with the dad escaping to work every day and the mum left to pick up the pieces and hold them all together. Plus the ungrateful son and daughter exaggerated for comic effect.The comedy element leaves us fairly quickly as one day they all wake up late due to a power failure. The kids are left with uncharged devices and therefore absolutely no communication with their friends. The dad wakes, I thought at 3pm, and yet bizarrely still arrives at work to find his colleagues also there. It’s only when they step outside their apartment block that they realise other blocks are without power and they soon learn all of Tokyo is without electricity.It’s now we grasp that this is no ordinary power cut and we see the family having to leave Tokyo, without cars or trains depending on electricity and certainly without communication devices.I recognise at some point the kids are going to stop being churlish and appreciate how easy they had it and the four will become a real family again. We follow their journey into a time that even the parents had forgotten and the children had never known as they embark to locate the mum’s elderly father and rediscover themselves.A little over acted but the story is an interesting one.7½/10