All Is Lost

This review contains spoilers.

The "All Is Lost" release puzzled me. A movie with this much positive press, and overwhelming good reviews, was showing at only one screen in Greater Vancouver.

After I saw the movie, I could understand why. More on that later.

Robert Redford is the only character in the movie. He gives the most lifelike, believable, fallible, intelligent performance I've ever seen. I could really imagine being there in his place during the entire film - doing everything he did, thinking everything he thinks. I would even be as quiet as he was - after the opening "letter reading" monologue, Redford speaks about ten words during the entire 106 minutes.

I spent the duration of the movie with my heart in my throat.

You've probably read about or heard the plot somewhere else by now. A lone man on a 39 foot sailboat in the Indian Ocean gets hit by a shipping container lost from a freighter. And then his boat starts to sink.

The movie is all about the sinking, the saving of supplies, the abandonment of the yacht to a life-raft, the struggle to be found - and all the hopelessness that entails.

You may as well have strapped a video camera onto an actual yachtsman and filmed all that ensues. Only during the movie you'll see things you could only imagine happen - like what a capsize would look like.

For anyone who's ever sailed, you can find a couple of "I would have done that" or "I would have had this" moments but for the most part everything that happens absolutely could (would?) happen. This movie should be mandatory viewing for anyone making an offshore passage in a sailboat. And there's the rub.

The theater was about 1/3 full for a matinee on it's Canadian opening weekend. I think the reason it was sparsely attended was because of the subject matter. It's a movie about sailing - or more precisely not sailing.

But it's a movie of survival. Way, way more believable than "Gravity", and I think it's actually a much better movie. Only because it could really happen today. And yesterday. And tomorrow.

So forget that you'd get even more out of the film if you sail. The story about a man, the sea, and mortality is an old story. But the telling of the story here is epic.

Go see it and tell me what you think...