The Blue Lagoon (1980)
Directed by Randal Kleiser
Two small children and a ship's cook survive a shipwreck and find safety on an idyllic tropical island. Soon, however, the cook dies and the young boy and girl are left on their own. Days become years and Emmeline and Richard make a home for themselves surrounded by exotic creatures and nature's beauty. But will they ever see civilization again?
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What critics compared The Blue Lagoon to
Despite comparisons to Alex Garland’s Annihilation , the better parallel for Gaia might be Randal Kleiser’s The Blue Lagoon .
…she was fresh off "The Blue Lagoon" and (despite winning the 1st Golden Raspberry Award for worst actress for her work in that film) seemed destined for a long Hollywood run.
Franco Zeffirelli’s operatic original is a pretty bad movie, but it did have a clear agenda: To exploit Shields’ notoriety as a teenage hottie, coming on the heels of “The Blue Lagoon.’’
That’s definitely the biggest surprise in Dudok de Wit’s otherwise straightforward tale, which goes on to imagine the harmonious existence of the man, and now a mysterious woman, who live on the island like the two lovebirds in The Blue Lagoon — or else like Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden.
For all its primeval appeal, the island isn’t nearly so carefree a paradise as “The Blue Lagoon,” and time brings significant challenges — as when the couple’s son tumbles into the same pool his father had several years earlier, or in the midst of a tropical storm that threatens to wipe out everything they have built together.
Instead, this feels like the demonic love child of Insidious , The Blue Lagoon and Amazon’s recent New Zealand-shot series The Wilds .
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The Blue Lagoon meets 2001: A Space Odyssey in the new movie Passengers, an intense romantic drama about two lonely souls abandoned on a giant spacecraft.
That means, in this old Yankee version of The Blue Lagoon , that Sam and Suzy camp out on a deserted beach (where he makes earrings for her out of fish hooks and dead beetles; it’s a minor complication that her ears haven’t been pierced — yet).
Franklin is best known for co-producing the film The Blue Lagoon (1980) as well as directing the films Patrick (1978), Psycho II (1983), Cloak & Dagger (1984), and Link (1986).
De Roche loved the content of the script and expressed his desire to write a film with a similar plot but set on a moving vehicle.[2] He developed the idea with Franklin in Fiji, where the latter was co-producing The Blue Lagoon (1980).
He discusses directing the movie Patrick (1978) and producing The Blue Lagoon (1980).
De Roche loved what he read and wanted to make a similar movie but within a moving vehicle, so the dup worked on the first draft while Franklin was producing The Blue Lagoon .
Franklin followed this by producing The Blue Lagoon , another massive international success.
Nevertheless, they never come close to the achievement of Carroll Ballard and Caleb Deschanel in "The Black Stallion," in which the picturesque was transcended and began to illuminate truly elemental longings.