“All Is Lost” Is Almost Hopeless

“Almost Hopeless”

“Hotshots” looks at a movie!

All Is Lost stars Robert Redford and was made from a script nearly free of dialogue and only 32 pages long.

However, that script could have been shortened to only one sentence: “A man is lost at sea all alone on a small crippled sailboat and struggles to survive.”

When the movie opens, we hear Redford’s voice say, “I tried to be true. I tried to be right. But I wasn’t. I’m sorry.”

Later on, we will learn the significance of those words and where they appear in the story, but first we see a title that says, “8 Days Earlier,” and the story begins.

Called only “Our Man” in the credits, Redford is asleep below deck on his 39-foot yacht when he is awakened by a loud noise and sees water coming into the cabin.

His boat has struck a floating cargo shipping container hard enough to damage both his boat and the container, which is now spilling its contents into the ocean.

And then we watch him struggle to survive and begin to consider our own mortality as surely as he considers his own.

He tries to repair the hole in the boat as best he can, pumps the water out of the cabin and cleans and dries it.

He dries and cleans his radio, finds a signal, and sends out the message, “This is the Virginia Jean with an SOS call. Over,” but he gets no response.

When a storm comes, he tries to secure everything aboard and puts on his gear for wet weather, but he gets knocked overboard.

His boat gets damaged even more, and later he also suffers a nasty gash to his forehead.

With water coming into the boat even more now, he gets his life raft, inflates it, and secures it to the boat and gets ready to abandon ship.

The water in the cabin is now up to his chest, and he retrieves everything he believes he will need, puts it all in the covered life boat, and climbs into it.

One of the items is a sextant, which is still in its box, appears to have been a gift, and he has to read the instructions on how to use it, so that he can plot his position on his navigation map.

All Is Lost is almost hopeless.

I’m Dan Culberson and this is “Hotshots.”