All Is Lost [Blu-ray]

There's nothing like a good story
Despite the lack of special effects, computer animation and 3-D, All is Lost keeps your attention and your interest. They even hold off on the mood music until the second half. Until then, about the only sounds are the lapping waves against the boat, right beside you in surround sound.

Unlike, say Harry Potter or James Bond films, there is real mortal risk for our (unnamed)hero. The outcome is far from guaranteed.

Robert Redford is battered by one lousy turn of luck after another, but he just keeps going. It just keeps getting worse and worse. There is only one alternative, and it is always there for him. So to that extent the film is exciting and suspenseful. But there are no guns, no villains and no betrayals, unless you believe God himself is behind this torture.

It shows once again that a good story trumps all, a lesson I wish Hollywood would buy into, instead of comic book heroes who we all know must triumph. Great stories have been sorely...

4.5 stars... "This is the Virginia Jean with an SOS call, over"
"All Is Lost" (2013 release; 100 min.) brings the story of "Our Man" (as Robert Redford is named in the credits) alone at sea. As the movie opens, we are told Our Man is 1,700 miles away from the Sumatra Straits in the Indian Ocean, and in a voice over, Redford tells us that "all is lost, except for the body and soul, or whatever remains of that. I'm sorry". The screen goes dark and then states "8 days earlier". We see Our Man waking up in his sailboat, only to find that there is gashing hole due to a collision with a container which appears to have fallen off a containership in mid ocean. And from there, Our Man's troubles start. Will Our Man make it out alive? To tell you more would ruin your viewing experience, you'll just have to see for yourself how it all plays out.

Several comments: this movie is a tour-de-force in every which way, the likes of which we don't get to see very much. A lot has been made about the fact that there is no dialogue in the movie, but frankly...

Impressed
I like that there is a lot of praise for this film, which I saw a few hours ago. It's still unfolding for me as I think about it, like another lost-at-sea film Open Water did a few years ago. In that one, the protagonists were hapless victims of absurdity they couldn't anticipate. In this one, it feels as though Our Man has long been preparing for a kind of existential showdown, his own requirement for redemption perhaps. The plausibility of the nautical aspects some have complained about isn't of particular interest to me. It is the conspiring sky and sea, and immutable Earthly forces grown to behemoth proportions that are central to the allegorical narrative. Our man is tossed and forgotten in their pitiless swirl, his grip on what identifies him is soon broken. In moments he is aglow as if lit from a watchful heaven, meanwhile sharks circle below. In its foreboding and uncertainty, there is poetry and beauty in the film. Highly recommended.

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