![]() "All Is Lost" takes place in a vast and eerie silence. There is no " Wilson" like in " Cast Away," a device allowing the stranded character to verbalize his feelings. He doesn't talk to himself, to let us in on his thought process. Redford is the only person in "All Is Lost." There is no dialogue. "Adrift" shares many similarities with " All Is Lost," the 2013 film starring Robert Redford, with some crucial differences. She hovers over maps, peers through the sextant, makes calculations, all while battling dehydration (and possibly a lingering concussion from her head injury). When problems arise, she has to figure out solutions. ![]() It is she who makes the decision to turn north and try to reach Hawaii, as opposed to continuing on to San Diego. "Adrift" flips back and forth between their burgeoning romance on Tahiti and the increasingly dire situation after the storm, as Tami struggles to keep herself and Richard alive. So it's not clear at first if they have decided to fictionalize the story, or if she is having some kind of sustained hallucination. Because this is a true story, we know Richard was swept off the boat, never to be seen again. His ribs are collapsed, his leg is badly wounded. She eventually makes it to the dinghy, and-with a superhuman effort, drags the injured Richard through the water back to the boat, and somehow (Kormákur doesn't show us how) pulls him up the ladder onto the deck. ![]() Filled with determination to get to him, she mends the yacht as well as she can, pumping water out of the cabin, fixing the sail. She thinks she sees Richard floating on a dinghy in the distance. She staggers onto the deck, only to find Richard's safety line dangling overboard. The cabin is filled with water and debris. The film starts with Tami lying injured in the interior of the yacht after the storm. Nobody's looking for intricate relationship subtlety in a movie like this. All of this is pretty standard stuff, and forgivable, really. The two speak their feelings bluntly ("I sailed half the world to find you"), with music swelling up on cue. There's not much substance to it, and the script (by Aaron Kandell, Jordan Kandell, David Branson Smith-apparently, there wasn't one female writer in a 4,000-mile radius who contributed to this story of a woman alone at sea) is low on subtext. Their love story involves jumping off cliffs, random laughter, and a conversation about flowers. When Richard ( Sam Claflin) and Tami ( Shailene Woodley) meet in Tahiti, she's working in a marina, a girl already somewhat "adrift" but not really worried about it yet, and he is a yacht-owner who wants to sail around the world. It's also a love story, presented with the subtlety of a sledgehammer. It's not just a story of an incredible feat of survival. ![]() "Adrift," the film adaptation directed by Baltasar Kormákur, wears its heart on its sleeve. In 2002, Ashcraft wrote a book about her experience, Red Sky in Mourning: A True Story of Love, Loss and Survival at Sea. Ashcraft had a head injury, and the yacht was badly damaged, but she managed to jerry-rig a sail and then navigated her way-manually, using a sextant and a watchover 1,500 miles to Hawaii. They struggled to control the yacht in 145-knot winds, and Sharp was washed overboard, lost in the mountainous seas. About halfway through their cross-Pacific journey, they ran into Hurricane Raymond, a tropical storm which had been building in power for a couple of weeks. In September, 1983, Tami Oldham Ashcraft and her fiance, Richard Sharp, were hired to take a 44-foot yacht on a 4,000-mile journey from Tahiti to San Diego.
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