By Emilio Frenk.
Director: Baltasar Kormákur
Cast: Shailene Woodley, Sam Claflin, Grace Palmer, Jeffrey Thomas and Elizabeth Hawthorne.
Rating: Very Good.
Icelandic Filmmaker Baltasar Kormákur, whose most notable work are films like “2 Guns” and “Everest” brings “Adrift”, a love story that does payoff.
Based on a true story the movie centers in Tami Oldham (Shailene Woodley) a free spirited girl from San Diego, California, who recently arrives to Tahiti.
She will meet Richard Sharp (Sam Claflin) a British adventurer who has a huge passion for sailing. Both Tami and Richard will form a potential bond that eventually leads to a relationship.
One day both Richard and Tami are asked by a couple to sail their yacht from Tahiti to San Diego. Everything goes fine during the trip until they hit a hurricane, where Richard is fatally injured.
Tami who wakes up from the events of the natural disaster, finds an unconscious Richard at sea and she rescues him.
Now Tami will figure out how to survive this ordeal with Richard before they run out of food and water.
“Adrift” is a film that is engaging from beginning to end and this is due to the characters that are very rich in this film.
Both Tami and Richard despite of being similar are different in some aspects, but this I think is a factor that works and I believe that if they would have been a 100% equal the film wouldn´t have worked.
Another factor that really helped is the fact that is a true story and is told by Tami´s point of view.
I liked how the film starts from the accident already happening and then it takes you to the journey of how this two people met to the conclusion of the film.
There are things that I think they could have been trimmed down and some of them were the length of some scenes. I felt that they were too long unnecessary and I think Kormákur at that side could have done a much better job.
The screenplay written by Aaron and Jordan Kandell and David Branson Smith is very detailed oriented and adapted the book “Red Sky in Mourning: A True Story of Love, Loss, and Survival at Sea” (also written by Tami Oldham Ashcraft) in a very convincing way.
I have mentioned previously that it can be a risk having three or more screenwriters on a project due that there can be a tendency that all parties can have different ideas and sometimes at the end of the day it can lead to disaster. Here was not the case and you can tell everyone put hard work on it.
Baltasar Kormákur´s directing was very sharp. He knew not only how to direct the sequences of the hurricane in a realistic way, but he focused in his cast as well.
Another factor that help on Kormákur´s directing was having three time Academy Award Winning Cinematographer Robert Richardson behind the camera. His work is again impressive, the way he played with this lighting was key and every framing has a meaning here.
I imagine that this film was very difficult to shoot, due that most of it takes place at sea and in those conditions is very challenging due to the trials that you face on set, bad weather the most frequent one.
Shailene Woodley give a fantastic and reaisticl performance. On the other hand Sam Claflin´s could have been better, and there were moments that he didn´t express to much. Here it could be one of the things that Kormákur could have focused better and the movie could have been better.
Another element that makes “Adrift” special was the fact that yes, it is a disaster movie but at the same time is a love story. The most common mistake in films like this one is the fact that it only focuses on the natural disaster and there isn´t enough character development.
“Adrift” is a movie that took me out of surprise. I highly recommend it and if you like this genre a suggestion would be to bring and pack of tissues with you, since you will be needing them.