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Saturday, April 19, 2014

All is Lost (2013)

This is a very tedious movie to watch.  The whole of it revolves around one man lost at sea, and there is not much in the way of inner dialogue that goes on, so we are basically watching him as he makes choices about what to do.  The movie opens with him giving up, addressing his impending death as he has run out of food.

In a deus ex machina move quite early in the film, he comes upon a container floating in the ocean that has canned food in it, and so his death is at least postponed.  He patches his ship's hull, he eats freely, and he attempts to repari his communication equipment.  He gets maps out and studies them, even using instruments, but there is little progress there.  Then there are a couple of near misses (or hits, in his case) where boats come within eyesight of him and fail to see him--despite his flare, they sail on by, and while he doesn't have much in the way of dialogue, you can see the deflation of hope for survival.  Then comes the storm, where he is forced to abandon ship and take up life in what appears to be a very well constructed and equipped life raft (having been on a number of evacuation vehicles on my trip to Antarctica, my main thought was that I hoped to God we never had to live out of them, because they did not seem all that well designed.  And they were woefully understocked with both sea sick pills and aspirin).  It all comes to a somewhat anticlimactic end, reinforcing the fact that one never wants to be lost at sea.

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