All Is Lost (2013)
Directed by J.C. Chandor
During a solo voyage in the Indian Ocean, a veteran mariner awakes to find his vessel taking on water after a collision with a stray shipping container. With his radio and navigation equipment disabled, he sails unknowingly into a violent storm and barely escapes with his life. With any luck, the ocean currents may carry him into a shipping lane -- but, with supplies dwindling and the sharks circling, the sailor is forced to face his own mortality.
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21 films that influenced All Is Lost
What critics say influenced All Is Lost
We go for years without a great survival movie a la “Cast Away” or “Touching the Void,” and suddenly we have two at the same time (“Gravity” is the other).
David: Writer/director J.C Chandor's new film about a sailor stranded in the Indian Ocean will inevitably be compared to Tom Hanks' "Cast Away", and to director Ang Lee's brilliant "Life of Pi".
Not even Tom Hanks’s impressive turn as a survivor on an island in Cast Away (2000) counts since his lengthy sojourn as the lone soul on screen is bookended by sequences before and after that feature other characters.
Similarly themed to “Cast Away” or even “Gravity” but not as enthralling as either.
Certainly, the plot will make it easy for some to tag this Life of Pi without the tiger, Cast Away without the volleyball, Gravity without George Clooney.
By offering Redford the sole role in this survivalist-at-sea pic – essentially, a leaner Cast Away (2000; with no landing) for the 77-year-old performer, and a chance to prove he’s still strong onscreen – Chandor had a good pitch for a tough sell.
Spencer Tracy played a Cuban fisherman in the 1958 The Old Man and the Sea, but he was on land with others at the beginning and the end.
A nerve-wracking reimagining of Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, All Is Lost’s grandiose portrait of honour in struggle is a lucid and indomitable celebration of the endurance of the human spirit that makes for one hell of a ride.
Maybe not in the same minimalist style — but, between Castaway , Life of Pi , The Perfect Storm and The Old Man and the Sea (fun fact: Spencer Tracy was 57 when he made that; Redford’s 77), these are familiar waters.
The film is being compared with John Sturges' 1958 adaptation of Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea, but over the years Sturges' film has become ripe for parody with its booming Dimitri Tiomkin score and a script that has Spencer Tracy holding extended conversations both with himself and the marlin he is trying to catch.
David: Writer/director J.C Chandor's new film about a sailor stranded in the Indian Ocean will inevitably be compared to Tom Hanks' "Cast Away", and to director Ang Lee's brilliant "Life of Pi".
Certainly, the plot will make it easy for some to tag this Life of Pi without the tiger, Cast Away without the volleyball, Gravity without George Clooney.
An impressively spare, nearly dialogue-free stranded -at-sea drama that strips characterization down to basic survival instinct, this emotionally resonant one-man showcase for Robert Redford faces a fair number of marketing challenges, given its audacious minimalism and proximity to a much splashier castaway adventure, “Life of Pi.”
The unsentimental tone is refreshing after the mawkishness of Ang Lee's Life of Pi, yet something is missing—a sense of Redford's social position, maybe, or other details that might better individualize him.
And that's without the awe-inspiring special effects of "Gravity" (where Sandra Bullock's character eventually ends up alone while stranded in outer space) or last year's "Life of Pi" (where Suraj Sharma's protagonist got to interact with a "real" tiger on his lifeboat, while flashbacks and present day interludes broke up the "stranded at sea" storyline).
The conception leaves itself open to satire, of course: I half expected Our Man to collide with the kid from “Life of Pi,” or Wilson the soccer ball from “Cast Away,” or be rescued by Tom Hanks from “Captain Phillips.”
It’s a very generic kind of image, first made famous in the shark’s-eye shots from Jaws.
Although you might not think it from the premise, this is the most compelling tale of nautical peril since Steven Spielberg’s Jaws.
There were times watching this that I thought I was watching "Jaws".
I suppose some folks will deride the film as 106 minutes of boat repairs, “Jaws” without the shark, “Moby-Dick” without the whale, “The Old Man and the Sea” without the marlin.
If Peter Benchley was able to channel Melville in Jaws (1975), I guess J.C. Chandor, writer and director of All Is Lost, can use Hemingway.
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And for a man in his late 70s, he tackles the role’s intense physical requirements with gusto; at one point, the ship capsizes, sending Redford rolling up the walls and to the ceiling in what looks like the horror-movie version of Fred Astaire’s famous gravity-defying dance in “Royal Wedding.”
In scenes recalling Stanley Donen’s “Royal Wedding,” Our Man appears to dance on the cabin ceiling as the ship rolls like a toy in the thundering waves.
Same goes for Danny Boyle’s similarly themed 127 Hours (2010), in which James Franco plays a rock climber who is trapped in a gorge when his hand becomes wedged underneath a boulder.
“127 Hours” depicted one man's isolation like a Gatorade commercial.
In “127 Hours,” “Life of Pi,” “Gravity” and now “All Is Lost,” life without so much as a Facebook status update becomes pure, noble, exhilarating — and extremely dangerous.
Some films have lengthy sequences with just one actor (127 Hours, Cast Away) but All Is Lost goes a step further.
There was a time when James Franco had things pretty much to himself in “127 Hours,” but recently Sandra Bullock has made the box office hum by being marooned in space in “Gravity,” and now Robert Redford is a yachtsman left adrift in the middle of the Indian ocean in “All is Lost.”
We don’t even get the hallucinations or songs that “127 hours” used to tell us who Aaron was, let alone any kind of “Cast Away” talking-to-a-basketball style conceit.
Redford, working every corner of his boat, takes us back to the Inuit hunter Nanook, in Robert J. Flaherty’s “Nanook of the North” (1922), methodically cutting a hole in the ice to catch a seal.
No, we’re talking about a tiny, tiny group of films that literally feature only a single actor on screen for the entire duration: Yaadein (1964), a little-known Hindi film directed by and starring Sunil Dutt as a man who reexamines his life after he comes home and thinks that his wife has left him; Robert Altman’s adaptation of the one-man play Secret Honor (1984), in which Philip Baker Hall plays Richard Nixon; and, most recently; Rodrigo Cortés’s Buried (2010), which takes place entirely inside a coffin where Ryan Reynolds has been buried alive in the Iraqi desert (but even that doesn’t quite count since we hear numerous off-screen characters via his cell phone).
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Robert Bresson made a similar existential film, “A Man Escaped,” about a prisoner in a Nazi camp who spent every waking moment in his daily routine plotting his escape and therefore his survival.
…think “Old Man and the Sea” by way of “The Perfect Storm” ?
Maybe not in the same minimalist style — but, between Castaway , Life of Pi , The Perfect Storm and The Old Man and the Sea (fun fact: Spencer Tracy was 57 when he made that; Redford’s 77), these are familiar waters.