From Baja to the Big Screen: Robert Redford is Stoicism Personified in 'All Is Lost' Sandra Hall - The Age
go to original March 18, 2014

After a collision with a shipping container at sea, a resourceful sailor finds himself, despite all efforts to the contrary, staring his mortality in the face. (Lionsgate)

This shipwreck movie, starring a weather-beaten Robert Redford, was shot in Baja, Mexico, in tanks used by James Cameron in the making of Titanic, but the scale of events is rather different.

After a collision with a shipping container at sea, a resourceful sailor finds himself, despite all efforts to the contrary, staring his mortality in the face.

This shipwreck movie, starring a weather-beaten Robert Redford, was shot in Baja, Mexico, in tanks used by James Cameron in the making of Titanic, but the scale of events is rather different.

This boat is a mere 12 metres long and Redford's yachtsman, who is never given a name, is sailing alone. There is hardly any dialogue, except for one anguished "F---!" howled at the heavens. At this stage Redford, like his boat, is at breaking point.

The film is by J.C. Chandor, who made his debut as a director in 2011 with Margin Call, an exquisitely executed dissection of a merchant bank's efforts to stay afloat on the eve of the global financial crisis. Think of it as a shipwreck story in business suits. But it was all talk. This one is all action, an intimate but epic battle between one human being and nature in the grip of a very serious temper tantrum.
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In Gravity, another film about a singular ordeal, we find the cosmos in a playful mood, tossing Sandra Bullock around as if she were a toy balloon happened on by happy accident. Here, the sea is not playful. It is furious – unwilling to rest until this human trespasser is thoroughly waterlogged and thrust into the depths.

Read the rest at The Age

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