Adrift is an adaptation of Tami Ashcraft’s “Red Sky in Mourning: The True Story of Love, Loss, and Survival at Sea,” which I may read. Tami, who is played by Shailene Woodley, and her boyfriend, Richard, who is played by Sam Claflin, decide to sail the world together forever when a big storm hits them and threatens to tear them apart forever. Will they survive?
I saw the preview for the movie and decided to see it at home. I love movies about people going out into nature and nearly dying, but they are generally more spectacle than substance though one can be pleasantly surprised. Also I saw other movies that Baltasar Kormakur, Adrift’s director, directed such as 2 Guns and Everest, which I found oddly dissatisfying despite the high quality so I knew that it was not worth a trip to the theater. Kormakur’s work seems to be strong on visuals and weak on narratives, which is unfortunately reflected in Adrift.
Adrift’s crucial mistake is that the narrative toggles between two time lines: the past, how they met, and the present, how they survived. I did not find that aspect confusing, although my elderly mother did, but if you are going to put characters in jeopardy, you have to get your audience invested in them first. By jumping timelines, I can’t get invested except in the abstract about the fate of any human being because I don’t know what they are like on a normal day from the beginning of the movie to understand their character development and growth or lack thereof. As the movie unfolds, I gradually learn, but it is important to establish more about your characters and their relationships before you hurl them into the void otherwise we are more invested in the spectacle, which I already was, than the people, but the filmmakers wanted me to care more about the characters without adequately developing them so it already unintentionally failed. It also has the unfortunate effect of making it harder to establish how much time has actually passed in either timeline so I have no way to gauge whether their relationship is developing at a normal pace or if they have been in the open sea for a long time.
The problem with Adrift is that if you came for the disaster, which I did, the film feels like an unbearable tease, and as a viewer, I gradually began to mentally check out when I realized that I would have to wait until the end of the movie to get what I came for: a scene showing the storm. This movie wants an audience equally invested in romance and disasters, but while the romance is nice, it is not so viscerally gripping and resonant that you would feel compelled to see this movie if nothing bad happened. So either the filmmakers would need to be equally good at romance and adventure dramas, which seems like a daunting task and a rare skill set to find someone with both though not impossible, or pick a storyline and stick to it.
Another issue that may be endemic to the original story, but is treated by the filmmakers as if it was a M. Night Shyamalan movie, is an issue regarding how Tami survived. Fairly early in Adrift, there is a point when I rewound and rewatched the movie because I could not make the same connection that the character made so I thought that I missed something, but I didn’t. My mom and I subconsciously picked up on this plot twist fairly early because of the opening scene, which resulted in us feeling an arm’s length distrust of the movie, and we could not get swept away. We kept questioning the film, which made us enjoy it less. I think that it was a huge mistake. Cynical viewers believe that the reason for this decision may be sexism, but I fault the anti-climatic romance angle. Adrift was aiming for Titanic, but should have been focused on All Is Lost, which I loved.
I decided to rewatch Adrift the next day by myself with the agenda to deliberately make the romance angle as important to me as the disaster and survival story, which I would advocate if you are determined to watch this movie. While this movie still needs a lot of work, if you change your expectations, then it improves because you will try to pay more attention to the dialogue and remember details of their personal story. If you are expecting a survival movie, it is hard to know which points are important so it will wash over you and be forgotten, especially because the story isn’t told simply and linearly.
Adrift is a beautiful movie to watch, but you can’t get lost in it, and it suffers the same problem as the title. Viewers can’t get as anchored into the storyline long enough to still care by the time that you see the penultimate event at the denouement. It felt like a lost opportunity and was disappointing, but I would not suggest that you run and get the remote to change the channel if it suddenly appears on your screen.