All Is Lost (2013) - Be Strong And Hopeful...

★★★☆☆

To be honest, I’ve never before sat down for any film featuring Robert Redford, a rather great actor to most movie lovers, until ‘All Is Lost’, a pretty close to reality version of ‘Old Man And The Sea’ that stars him and him only! This is a film of basically no dialogues, no music, no breathtaking pictures, no fierce or lovely animals, no tricky camera work, no complicated story to tell, nothing particular at all, just a man fighting to survive. So what’s great about this film as most people and critics said it is so? Well, it’s not great to me anyway but it does leave me an ambivalent aftertaste. I guess it’s not a film you’d find impressive when or right after you watch it, but you’d start feeling it when you recall it a bit later.

The film opens with a man voicing over his last words seemingly, saying ‘I’m sorry. I know that means little at this point, but I am. I tried. I think you would all agree that I tried. To be true, to be strong, to be kind, to love, to be right. but I wasn’t.’ He isn’t given a name. Neither do we know what’s happened to him. But judging by what he just said, we guess he’s been kind of messed up and wronged. That he’s out there being alone at the open sea to try to recollect or rediscover something. Only thing we can be sure however, that he’s absolutely not ready to die yet!

You may feel like this is a true story but it isn’t. It can’t be, because in reality, I guess no one can be that strong and hopeful and lucky enough to be able to just hang in there when all seems to have been lost. This fictional story works like an advice though: life’s dark sometimes, but as long as we don’t lose heart and hope, we’ll always see the light. Sad that we seldom take it!