Adrift (2018)

 

ADRIFT (2018)

By Ralph Santini - **

Icelandic filmmaker Balthazar Kolmakur’s new film Adrift stars the absolutley cute Shailene Woodley, along with Sam Claflin, and is based on a true story of a loving freethinking couple in 1983 where they want to set sail on a grand journey but as the two competent sailors set out on a journey they suddenly get surprisingly stuck into one of the most dangerous hurricanes in natural history. After the storm caused plenty of trouble to our movie’s heroes, Tami (Woodley, with pretty decent acting in the role as the female lead) seemingly finds her beau Richard (Claflin who has a surprisingly inferior performance by the way) horrendously injured with possible gangrenous infections. Tami seems to have very bad feelings towards the survival so she struggles to find force and willpower to save herself and the biggest beau of her life. 

Okay, right now I’m about to be very blunt about this particular survival melodrama. Shailene Woodley does a rather good job of portraying the main strong female lead of the real life Tami Oldham who still continues to sail up to this day. Her character has real brains and real guts because she seems to belong to the wild nature of the ocean and knows how to survive the real dangers of cyclonic hurricanes because it’s not at all easy to survive one. In fact she is the movie’s biggest asset. On a more so-so angle I couldn’t find anything spectacular about her romantic chemistry with Sam Claflin. What’s worse is that the dramatization of the story seems to focus too much on that. It seem that the rather far-fetched screenplay Kendall brothers and David Bransom wants the movie’s viewers to care about that particular romance but, with the heavy critical, analytical eye I’ve got I just couldn’t. 

And the way the movie uses flashbacks after the movie opened where we see Ms. Woodley wake up in the hurricane aftermath is what really tones down the movie altogether. What’s more these flashbacks that concentrate on the romance between Woodley and Claflin are basically longer than the more compelling scenes where Woodley is lost at sea struggling to go on living. Another winning asset for this movie is actually Robert Richardson’s stunning cinematography that make the movie look like were actually exploring some pleasant paradise that reflects the pacific island’s demure nature. 

My overall feeling for this movie is that it might be one those crowd pleasing films that somehow do not give a satisfactory result with a story that could deserved to be told but with the way the movie dramatizes the romance between the characters by Shailene Woodley and Sam Clalflin it just doesn’t really do it for me.