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Aug 14, 2018gord_ma rated this title 3.5 out of 5 stars
“All lost! to prayers, to prayers! all lost!” (The Tempest. I.i.61)   [All Is Lost] is a 2013 minimalist dialogue survival film written and directed by J.C. Chandor. The film is about a man (played by Robert Redford) who wakes up in his boat to find it damaged and partially flooded by saltwater in the middle of an ocean and the chain of events that ensued. [All Is Lost] was nominated for an Oscar and won a Golden Globe for Best Original Score. Redford won the New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Actor (noice) and then the notice of a small outfit run by producer Kevin Feige that soon hired him in another film that you may or may not have heard of:        [Captain America: The Winter Soldier].   If all life is educative, Chandor’s [All Is Lost] can teach us much.  First, we are all judged the same before nature. Redford’s hero, a man of implied wealth, of evident experience, of good intuitions, of impressive will, of training and of great preparedness finds all of these qualities almost useless in the face of nature. Experience, money, skill, and technology, all of these qualities are hushed before nature’s wrath. At the most, such qualities can only let us hang on for the ride. And through interesting cinematography, and realistic sound effects, Redford’s hero fights titanic, Herculean fights to save his ship only to find himself repeatedly thwarted, and thwarted most cruelty, by a sea that will not be satiated by any sacrifice, by any tribute, until all have been subdued by its cold embrace. And to rub salt to an open wound, the plight of Redford’s hero is ignored even by other humans ‘til he is reduced to the clothes on his back. Why?  Second, for sometimes life is just unfair and nothing can prepare for that. Sometimes, there is no rescue from within or from without. Sometimes there is no reward for participation. Sometimes, heroic struggles just go unrecorded in our news because those people didn’t survive the ordeal. And were it not for a message in a bottle, the experience of Redford’s hero may have gone as unnoticed as the sound of a tree falling in the forest with nobody to hear it. This is quite possible, all within the realm of the imagination, and now on the big screen. And sometimes, there simply is no glorious victory and no happy ending. Sometimes, the old man in the sea just loses.  How many days had Santiago gone without catching a fish in Hemingway’s novel? 84. Santiago had fought with a big marlin for three days, and then sharks ate the marlin’s carcass and left him with nothing but the skeleton and his shattered pride when he returned home a day later. As a fish skeleton does not hold the same exchange value of a whole fish, Santiago retreats in shame, but hold on. The villagers who had shunned him saw the marlin bones, recognized his efforts, and made apologizes to him. Yes, he ruined his hands, he lost the fish, but he won. How?  For third, “‘man is not made for defeat,’ he said. ‘A man can be destroyed but not defeated’” (The Old Man and Sea, pg.103). It is the struggle and our will that defines us. After all worldly goods are lost, after the body has faded, after the mind has tired, past where ingenuity has peaked, it is the human will in [All Is Lost], our instinct to survive, that drives us to persist to the bitter end. That some persist longer in the face of the inevitable is a measure of virtue.  And when finally submerged by the sea, Redford’s hero descends into the murky depths, further and further he falls until all is dark and lifeless, the battle lost… all hopes betrayed… That is, until—spoiler—a light shines upon him from above, a light that spurs life back into his legs and that makes him fight and crawl for every inch and every foot.  If life could shout at him I think it would shout, “Do you want to live?”  Redford’s hero said nothing, but if he could’ve I think he would’ve said, “Swim! Swim! Swim!”