This deceptively simple tale of one man (Robert Redford in arguably the best performance he’s ever given) lost at sea and scrambling to survive is every bit the pared down, beautifully minimalist against-the-odds survival story that Gravity is. Now of course the box office for All is Lost won’t be anything close to Gravity, but I think they’re natural companion pieces.
What Works: This is a true one-man show. Literally no one but Redford is on screen for even a second. Here, there are absolutely no tricks usually employed by most “one man” movies like Cast Away or I Am Legend. There are no flashbacks, hallucinations, sideways story lines of frantic rescuers, characters talking to animals, or miraculous “others” found to break up the singular story of one man whose boat hits a shipping container in the first minute of the movie and his desperate scramble to survive even as rations run low and monster hurricanes rage outside. When Redford is being battered by torrential rains, we’re with him. When he’s shimmying up the side of a mast (it’s really him up there, doing his own stunt work), we’re pulling for him. When he gets knocked out of his boat trying to set up a life raft, we stop breathing for a few seconds. This extremely low-tech “thriller” (and I realize some will be bored by it) strips the action down to such a believable level that it puts us as close as we can possibly be to an ordinary man in an extraordinary situation. Getting inside a character’s point of view is the kind of thing Hollywood seems to have given up on, and it’s hopeful to see it so alive here.
What Doesn’t Work: I realize that for every person who loves this movie as much as I do, there will be one that will scratch their heads at what I see in it. The best movies aren’t always for everyone, and a Hemingway-esque tale of having one man (who says probably ten lines of dialogue in the whole movie) survive against nature definitely isn’t. If you can admire an oil painting of a sailboat wracked by a storm, and find something fundamentally captivating about that image, then you’ll probably like this movie. If you walk past paintings like that without a second thought, then I’d say it’s a toss-up at best…
What I Would Have Done Differently: This film will definitely be in my top ten of 2013, so I can’t say there’s anything I would have done differently.