"All Is Lost" Movie Review

There’s only one character in the new film All Is Lost. If this character were an unknown actor, or even a known actor you didn’t care about, it would be opening in two theaters or going straight to DVD. The fact that it’s Robert Redford, who at 77 years old a living legend who may not be around much longer, makes this movie feel important. At an hour and forty-five minutes and with much less dialogue and music than its predecessor Castaway, there aren’t many actors who could hold our attention until the end. Redford does, and makes us feel every moment.

The film takes place in the middle of the Indian Ocean, where Redford’s character, who is never named, is manning a sailboat alone. We don’t know why he is alone or what motivated this trip. All we know is that he has family back home (he sends out a message in a bottle at one point that he hopes will reach them). We quickly learn one thing about him: he is resourceful, and as bad things happen, the plot quickly evolves into a survival film.

At the Telluride Film Festival in 2013, director J.C. Chandor (Margin Call) claimed that he wrote this movie to begin a conversation about death with his children. Its minimalism and lack of melodrama make it all the more powerful and realistic (Chandor also claimed that the 77-year old Redford pushed to do as many of his own stunts as possible and that Redford, incredibly, is in “90-95%” of the movie).

Survival films on the water like Open Water and The Perfect Storm remind us how cold and cruel nature can be. All Is Lost shows a man doing his best but realizing that his best is not enough. Its ambiguous ending will have viewers arguing over its meaning, but there will be no argument over its star’s ability to keep a virtually silent film afloat.

I would recommend this film to parents as a fairly ‘safe’ film to show your kids to begin conversations about death, survival, and learning to count the cost of decisions. I also recommend it to people who appreciate independent films and non-generic films that don’t spell everything out.