Man vs. Ocean Part 4

There have been a bunch of man vs. ocean movies lately: Life of Pi, Kon-Tiki, The Deep. And now comes J.C. Chandor's All Is Lost, about a man on a small yacht (39 feet, says the Wikipedia page) who accidentally loses power and begins to take on water after crashing into an abandoned shipping container (apparently filled with children's shoes). From there our man is alone in the ocean with little hope of rescue.

Mr. Redford as Our Man

All Is Lost is different from the other movies I mentioned – and indeed unique for this year – in that it has only one character. Robert Redford anchors the movie: is its only character, its only voice. And being alone in the ocean trying to survive he says very little. The fact that he is the only character means we know almost nothing about him.

Who is this man?
Why is he alone?

Who was his family?
To whom would he return?
What does he do for a living?
How long has he been sailing?
What is he doing in the Indian Ocean?

When he writes a letter of goodbye, to whom is he writing?
For what is he apologizing?

In this way, All Is Lost is a mystery as much as it is an adventure story. Because we know nothing about our man, we search his face, his possessions, his every action for answers. Our man, though, is a survivor. That's what he is. Chandor doesn't give us backstory. If our man thinks about his life, his regrets, his loves, we know nothing of it. We see only his face and the things that he does to try to stay afloat, alive, and healthy.

If this is valuable as a kind of pure, ascetic filmmaking (and I think it is), it has its drawbacks, too. The reason I liked Kon-Tiki is because it is about teamwork and sticking it out and dealing with other people in confined spaces. One of the reasons I loved The Deep so much, is that it is a meditation on death and on managing things of which we do not know we are capable. The Deep is also fundamentally about losing other people, about coping with that loss, about getting back to something.  

All Is Lost is about staying alive and nothing else, survival tout court. As I say, this is an awesome, unique way of approaching such a story, but I couldn't identify with our man as much as I would've liked. I wanted to know what he was thinking about. I wanted to be alone with him, the way I was alone with Sandra Bullock in Gravity, the way I was alone with Ólafur Darri Ólafsson in The Deep.

I will say that I like this J.C. Chandor's stuff. I liked Margin Call and I liked this. He has a kind of cinematic austerity and clarity that I really enjoy. I look forward to his next picture.

Kon-Tiki vs. Life of Pi

Apparently, I liked Life of Pi when I first saw it, and I guess I should stick with that opinion because I have no intention of re-watching the film. But last evening I sat down and watched Joachim Rønning and Espen Sandberg's Kon-Tiki and all I could do was compare it to Ang Lee's beloved film from last year.

First off, Kon-Tiki, unlike Life of Pi, is not a kids' film, and it doesn't have the kind of storytelling frame that Pi has, where the story is told to us by an unreliable narrator.

More importantly, Kon-Tiki is a true story, an actual historical event that took place in the late 1940s. Kon-Tiki is the tale of a group of six men who sailed from South America to the Polynesian islands – in other words: five thousand miles across the Pacific Ocean – on a raft. Kon-Tiki, though, always seems real. And I am sure that some of the film was done using CGI. I have no doubt of it, in fact, but it never looked fake. These guys are sailing the ocean on a raft and they look like they are in the ocean on a raft. (I don't know if you remember Life of Pi, but what with the fake tiger and the flying fish and the fake sunsets and the fake water and the fake animals, I never felt like I was in the real world at all.)

Kon-Tiki is an adventure/journey story, rather in the mode of Deliverance, The Way Back, or The Grey: so it is really a movie about testing the mettle of a group of men who are alone in the wild with no one to help them but their own ingenuity and a bunch of blind luck. It is gorgeously made, with impressive and immaculate costume design and a group of actors doing fine work, and I have to say I found most of it rather gripping.

Rønning and Sandberg's movie has its share of clichéd scenes – the terrified and useless Ned Beatty character from Deliverance is embodied in this case by a tubby refrigerator salesman played by Anders Baasmo Christiansen – but it also has a few filled with extraordinary tension. There is a sequence where the men literally grab a shark out of the ocean and eviscerate it on the raft that left me with my mouth gaping.

All in all, Kon-Tiki is something like Life of Pi for grown-ups. Kon-Tiki doesn't take the (child's) point of view that the world is magical; it looks at the Earth, thinks about it scientifically, and still finds the world wonderful.

Oscar Nominees 2013: Part 10 of 13

Kon-Tiki

1 Nomination

• Foreign Language Film: Norway (Elling, The Other Side of Sunday, Pathfinder, Nine Lives)

Directors: Joachim Rønning & Espen Sandberg

Cast: Pål Sverre Hagen, Anders Baasmo Christiansen, Gustaf Skarsgård, Odd Magnus Williamson, Tobias Santelmann, Jakob Oftebro, Agnes Kittelsen

I am angry at this film, site unseen, and the reason is because (I've heard that) Rønning & Sandberg filmed scenes in both Norwegian and English at that what will eventually be distributed in the U.S. will be in English and not in Norwegian. Now, I am not sure why anyone would do that, but I object. It's going to  play at art-houses anyway: it's not like it's going to move into multiplexes just because it's in English. Anyway, this nomination is good for Norway, whose films (Happy Happy, Angel, Max Manus, O' Horten, Gone with the Woman) have not been doing well with the Academy in recent years. Kon-Tiki, however, will not be winning the Oscar, and everyone knows that.

Will Win: N/A

Could Win: N/A

My Rating: Not Ranked – 2013 Release

Prometheus

1 Nomination

• Visual Effects

Director: Ridley Scott

Cast: Noomi Rapace, Michael Fassbender, Charlize Theron, Logan Marshall-Green, Idris Elba, Guy Pearce, Sean Harris, Rafe Spall

This was a disappointment to almost everyone, apparently. I thought this movie was sort of fine, but all of my friends who are real Alien fans were pretty pissed. Oscar is correct, though: the failings that this film had were failings of plotting, pacing, and theme, not visual failings. The film, in fact, looks pretty amazing. The effects really are cool in Prometheus – alien births, alien caesarians, aliens inside Logan Marshall-Green's eyes, weird alien life forms that become snakes out of a weird black goo. In other words, the nomination is deserved, but people disliked this movie so much that it hasn't a chance in the world of winning the Oscar here.

Will Win: N/A

Could Win: N/A

My Rating: #43 out of 65

The Avengers

1 Nomination

• Visual Effects

Director: Joss Whedon

Cast: Robert Downey Jr., Samuel L. Jackson, Tom Hiddleston, Chris Hemsworth, Chris Evans, Mark Ruffalo, Scarlett Johansson, Jeremy Renner, Clark Gregg

Well I thought this was sort of boring. The boredom, it seemed to me, had chiefly to do with the way Joss Whedon plotted the movie – and maybe that means I should blame the screenwriter – but I guess I mean that the tone of this giant, big-budget, summer action movie, instead of being a series of set-pieces like Transformers (which I freely admit is asinine, but is at least never boring) is a series of conversations about really important things like fighting bad guys and standing up for your country and personal freedom. The whole thing jumps back and forth between plots as though it is a television show, but things never really quite knit together, and I was left confused for much of the movie. Not necessarily confused about what was happening in the movie, just confused about why I ought to have cared in the first place.

Will Win: N/A

Could Win: N/A

My Rating: #58 out of 65