All Is Lost (2013) Reviews

• Disappointing for sailors - but still a great performance

  yorick_obean2013-10-21

  CONTAINS SPOILERS - Outstanding performance, beautifully underplayed, gripping. This works for me, mostly. It's great in its deliberate confinements. But, as a sailor, I am disappointed. There are inconsistencies, but even more astounding is the lack of our man's seamanship. Pretending to be a seasoned sailor, he makes quite a fool of himself through horrible negligence: There is no "abandon ship bag", he carries an empty fresh water tank, he uses no sails or the engine during the storm, etc... In some details I beg to differ from comments I have seen in other comments: Our man's radio skills are not exactly text book. The useless boat hook from Worst Marine, and the sextant being unwrapped in the life raft only, were nice details contributing to the characterization of our man. So even for sailors there were some nice hints of cutting corners, hubris and overconfidence. I assume the shortcomings in our man's seamanship were deliberately written into the script - otherwise we would have too much of a superman. If real development happens in this movie, it is probably his ruefulness that he never learned and practiced his stuff in time and went so poorly prepared out to sea. Some situations get solved too quickly: Bringing down a furled head sail and pulling up a storm jib is a real bummer in a storm, especially alone. Jumping without live vest in a storm out of a life raft to right it? Easy peasy. Anyway, the movie showed sufficiently the exhaustion our man has to go through. Just his overboard experiences (twice from the boat, once from the life raft) are quite implausible. I nearly started laughing when he swam back underwater to his capsized boat and just held on in the cockpit until he was back up and in business. At least he wore a knife at all times, tied to his pants. Good sailor! Still an interesting movie to see. But as movie with this realistic, not to say naturalistic approach it has certainly some flaws for sailors.

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• The triumph of human spirit

  cinematic_aficionado2013-12-31

  Ocean sailing that went sour. Man wakes up in the middle of absolute oceanic nowhere to find he had collided with a container, causing damage to his boat as well as rendering communications totally ineffective. The film is made as a series of events aiming for this man to fail. Once restoration and improvement of conditions is achieved, a setback occurs. He is exposed, unprotected and threatened once again. Death is constantly around the corner. The sequences are very realistic, accurately depicting the inherent risk of sea adventure. The calm is followed by a storm which is succeeded by another calm. The success of this film lies in the fact that it is held well together, despite the complete absence of dialogue and this why only an actor of the stature of Robert Redford could pull this off and is in terrific shape despite his 77 years. Ultimately, it is a tale of triumph of the human spirit that will not yield in the face of adversity and will fight to the very end to survive.

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• Really shows how good of an actor Redford is. Nothing but watching him trying to stay alive but you really root for him.

  cosmo_tiger2014-01-07

  "This is the Virginia Jean with an SOS call...over." After running into a shipping container a relaxing trip in a boat turns into a fight for survival. Left with nothing more then what is on the ship and ruined equipment the sailor (Redford) must do everything he can to stay alive until he can be rescued. Going in I expected this to go one of two ways, either super boring or super intense. After seeing Gravity and how tense that was I was hoping for more of the same. I was let down by that expectation. I will however say that this movie really shows what a great actor Robert Redford is. Movies like Cast Away and Gravity while mainly about someone being alone did have other people in it and had a back story for the person. This one ONLY had Robert Redford and it starts as soon as he hits the tanker. No back story or anything about the character. There is also a total of about 20 words in the movie. All that said by the end you are really rooting for the guy and hope someone finds him. That is the sign of a great actor, being able to make people root for you and feel emotions without words. As good as he was in this though the movie isn't for everyone. It really is just watching someone trying to stay alive in the ocean alone for over an hour and a half. If you think you would be interested then go for it. If you don't then you may be too bored to care about what is going on. Overall, a pretty good movie but it isn't for everyone. I give it a B-.

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• Our Man is Sorry

  ferguson-62013-11-01

  Greetings again from the darkness. In Cast Away, Tom Hanks makes friends with a volleyball. In The Old Man and the Sea, Spencer Tracy talks to the whale. In Harvey, James Steward chats it up with a tall imaginary rabbit! It takes Robert Redford to show us how to face isolation with dignity and silence (save one well-deserved F-word). Writer/director J.C. Chandor brought us the very good Margin Call (2011), which was filled with many characters and significant dialogue. Here, he delivers a single character and no real dialogue - only the initial log entry and a couple of SOS calls into a short-circuited radio. This is one man's struggle for survival. It's that man vs nature. It's our man facing mortality and isolation. So you are probably wondering how this can hold your attention for two hours. The real answer is Robert Redford. At age 77, his screen presence is remarkable. Having never been a "showy" actor, his performance and this movie depend on facial expressions, his body language, and mostly his ability to connect with an audience immediately. Technically, the movie is exceptional, especially in sound design and in creating a terrifying and believable situation. Alex Ebert's music is subtle and effective, but let's get real ... Mr. Redford and his mop of red hair are the reason to see this movie. There is almost no back story on this character, other than what we infer from his opening log entry. We know his "I'm sorry" has many meanings to his family, but we soon realize his will to live probably comes from an internal drive connected to his apology. It's nice to see a role for an older actor that doesn't included stupid humor designed to make kids laugh. Not much humor in this one, but there's no reason to be sorry.

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• All logic is lost

  steve-27-2587832014-06-14

  I grew up around boats and the ocean and was really looking forward to this movie. There are very few sailing movies and the reviews for this one where all great. Unfortunately the holes in this movie are far larger than the ones that sunk the yacht. I am very happy to suspend belief in movies that are not meant to be technically realistic, but this movie is based on a real life situation and tries to be realistic but fails miserably. The trouble starts on the very first scene, the 'sailor' wakes up to find his yacht full of water. It has hit a shipping container and is filling up with water through a large hole. He must have been on the whiskey the night before because apparently he slept right through the crash that tore the hole into the back of the yacht (odd that it caused a hole in the back of the yacht). He stands there looking at the hole in the side of the yacht with water pouring in, just one arms length away from the bilge pump button (a pump designed to work under water to pump water out of the yacht). Does he flick the switch ? No he doesn't bother lifting his arm up and turning on a pump to start pumping the water out of the boat. Of course when he does hit the switch some time latter the pump doesn't work. That would probably indicated a flat battery, but the battery wasn't flat as he used it to power the radio latter on. He never really bothered to try to work out what was up with the bilge pump, instead opting to pump the water out by hand, after having to make a handle for the manual pump (I guess the vandals took the original handle). After removing the container from the side of the yacht, he then sails away but changes his mind and sails back to the container, leaning to the side of yacht where the hole is, thus letting more water flow in and then literally rams the shipping container that has already nearly sunk him ! Maybe he was still on the whiskey, but this guy really should not be in charge of this yacht. Then there is the logic behind the broken radio. First up, it is a VHF radio, used for short range communication. At sea a yacht would use a HF radio, but anyway, he manages to get it working and hears voices, but the radio is going on and off. So he climbs the mast to find the antenna unplugged ! If the antenna was unplugged he would not have heard a thing on the radio, unless the transmitting station was right next to him and anyway an unplugged antenna would have nothing to do with the radio turning on and off, which is obviously a result of salt water damage to the radio ! So he plugs the antenna back in and while at the top of the mast notices a storm coming. When he comes back down, does he try the radio that he just spent a great deal of effort supposedly trying to fix ? NO HE HAS A SHAVE ! Where is the logic in it ! He could see the storm coming, yet he does not bother to try the radio again. OK, so the boat sinks, after suffering the huge unluckiness of getting yet another hole (even though the original hole is patched up) and after he makes several more very poor decisions, such as leaving it too late to put the storm sail up, going outside during the massive storm for no apparent reason, leaving the main hatch open etc. So he deploys the life raft, a good idea. He ties the life raft to the yacht and gets into the life raft. Does he cut the line, no. OK so he is going to leave the line attached to the yacht ... pretty dangerous, but I guess he thinks the yacht probably won't sink and he will keep a close eye on it on cut the line if the yacht starts to goes under .... oh no no no, he goes to sleep in the life raft with it attached to the yacht ! There is no point even being in the life raft, if the yacht sinks, he goes down with it. No sailor would ever ever do something so stupid. It just defies basic logic. There are so many holes in this movie. Even the effects are bad, the rain is always vertical but if there was a storm that was making the sea so rough, there would be high winds and the rain would be more horizontal .. in fact there is really no wind effect anywhere in the movie. Even when he is trying to get the storm sail up it is hardly blowing around. When the storms clears by morning the sea returns to being flat, there is no left over swell, completely unrealistic. The way the guy moves, so slowly all the time even in critical situation was also very annoying, there is no urgency or sense of panic in it, personally I think the acting was terrible. I have been aboard boats that are taking on water and believe me you do not think, you act. I can only assume the sailor is either an alcoholic or senile, either way he should not be the captain of anything that floats. He doesn't even bother to equip the yacht with an EPIRB, something that is law in most countries, but common sense to have for anyone going to sea and is something that would have ensured his timely rescue. A very disappointing movie, obviously made by people who have no idea about the subject matter and seemingly lack basic logic.

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