Starring Daoming Chen, Chen Li, Yi Lu

Directed by Xiaogang Feng

As it is new release Tuesday, I have no doubt that most of you are pursuing the aisles of your favorite video store here in Toronto looking for whatever new films that this week has to offer.  Out this week is a multiple award winner at the Asian Film Awards and the Asian Pacific Screen Awards as well as being China's official selection for the best foreign language film at the most recent Academy Awards ceremony.  It's time for "Aftershock".

"Aftershock" takes us to Tangshan, China where two seven year old twins are buried under the rubble of the deadliest earthquake of the 20th century.  The rescue team explains to their mother that freeing either child will almost certainly result in the death of the other.  After already losing her husband in the quake she is forced to make the most difficult decision of her life and ultimately decides to save her son.  Though left behind for dead, the little girl survives unbeknownst to either her mother or her brother.  We follow the remaining family members on their separate journeys over the course of the next 32 years as the lives that they build are forever in the shadow of the traumatic experience of the earthquake.

As a tribute to the city of Tangshan and the 240,000 people that in that earthquake in 1976, "Aftershock" was a story that deserved to be told.  As a film however, "Aftershock" had problems.  It all looked very good, but the story made these large jumps in the timeline as we were following everyone's different stories and it made it very hard to have any legitimate emotional connection to the characters.  Yes, they all survived something horrible but we never really cared about any of them.  It could be chalked up to the quality of the cast or the writing but the viewer never real experienced their collective pain, we were on the outside looking in.  It was only towards the end of the film that we got any sort of emotional moment and connection to these characters but by then it was too late.

There are some semi recognizable faces in this ensemble cast that have appeared in films like 'Hero' and 'Rush Hour 3'.  Nobody was bad, but they all failed in making us care about what happened to them, which in a film of this nature is kind of important.

"Aftershock" tells a story in the results of the worst natural disaster of the 20th century, make no mistake that the story deserves to be told, it's just that everyone involved didn't do enough to make us remember it 5 minutes after we've ejected the DVD.

2 out of 5 stars.

"Aftershock" is available at video stores across Toronto; click here for a list of some of the finer independent stores near you.

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