Tsunami: Race Against Time
WINNER 2024 BUZZIE AWARD BEST WRITING
“Horrifying, heart-rending and essential”
Tsunami: Race Against Time, a four-part documentary that flies by, reshapes the catastrophe into an anthology of gripping stories, capturing the carnage and stirring, moving tales of survival. The contemporary footage – walls of water silently approaching beaches, torrents raging through buildings, people hurt or dead in the aftermath – has been painstakingly resourced and expertly linked together, but it’s the testimonies of the survivors that stick… They are lucid, thoughtful, emotive speakers. It’s a privilege to see and hear them; that terrible day important to revisit.
Jack Seale, The Guardian
“Remarkable”
In the vast catalogue of disaster documentaries that aim to reconstruct catastrophic events, National Geographic’s Tsunami: Race Against Time, which premiers tonight, stands apart not merely for its timing—marking two decades since the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami—but for its peculiar ability to transmute raw footage into something approaching tragic poetry. The series performs a delicate dance between documentation and elegy, wielding hundreds of hours of amateur video with a curator’s eye for the telling detail and a novelist’s sense of narrative arc.
Tsunami: Race Against Time ultimately succeeds in being both memorial and warning. It honors the dead while forcing us to confront uncomfortable questions about our relationship with natural forces we can neither fully understand nor control. In an age of accelerating climate change, these questions have only grown more urgent.
Scientific Inquirer, Scientificinquirer
“A testament to the fusion of science, storytelling, and human resilience”
As the world marks 20 years since the tsunami, this docuseries serves as a powerful reminder of the event’s enduring lessons and the need for vigilance in the face of nature’s unpredictability. For those who experienced it and those who learn from it, the series offers a sobering yet hopeful perspective on one of history’s most profound natural disasters.
Tony Bradley, The Forbes
“Unfolds Like a Thriller Instead of a Documentary”
It is a rare feat for a documentary series to educate, shatter emotionally, uplift and terrify all at once, but Tsunami: Race Against Time manages all of the above.
All told, Race Against Time is an extraordinarily thorough documentation of the deadliest tsunami in recorded human history. It is a story of nature’s power and humanity’s fragility — and of human endurance. It is a cautionary tale that seeks to educate viewers about recognizing when a tsunami is imminent. Above all, Race Against Time is a moving and fitting tribute to mark the 20th anniversary of an almost unfathomable tragedy.
Rae Alexandra, KQED
