Adrift

My wife and I watched this at home on BluRay from our local library. The picture and sound are great and the surround sound makes you feel like you are in the middle of a storm.

The title sort of gives the plot away, the core story is survival during a long period in a disabled sailboat. There really isn't a lot fancy going on here, moviewise, but it is a well-made movie and knowing it really happened adds to the value of watching it.

Shailene Woodley as Tami Oldham and Sam Claflin as Richard Sharp were near the correct ages of 24 and 33 when the depicted story occurred. He was sailing all over the world when they met in Tahiti, she was just working herself along, traveling to random places, getting away from her upbringing in San Diego.

An older couple he knew needed to fly back to the states so they asked Richard to sail their larger boat to San Diego for them, he would get $10,000 for his efforts and a first class airfare back to his boat. He said OK but make that two first class tickets.

The two of them headed out, sailing happily together, until the weather turned bad. It was 1983, the systems for early warning of hurricanes was not as good as it is today.

Good movie of an interesting story of love and survival. The editing technique has the movie cutting often to several months earlier and then to the film's present.

Great movie that never lost my attention. Between the surprising twists (that I won't mention because they would be spoilers) and the intense action all through the movie I was glued to the screen. Shailene Woodley's great acting carried the movie like, in a smaller way, how Tom Hanks captivated in Cast Away. Definitely worth seeing. I would suggest see it without knowing much about the story.

It's a great movie, it's just best that you go into it knowing as little about it as possible. The movie tells its own story and according to Tami it tells it very well. It's one of those that has you whispering "oh no" and "not again" every so often and you really feel as hopeless as the situation must have felt at the time.

It's also refreshing to have a movie that tells an exciting movie about ordinary people doing extraordinary things without something blowing up or morphing into a piece of machinery.

"Adrift" is a good survival drama that you know what to expect but Shailene Woodley makes it more emotionally satisfying than it would be otherwise. All the performances are exceptional, directed with good pace and beautiful cinematography and effects by Baltasar Kormakur.

This realistic, suspenseful and romantic, true story it's not quite as exciting as watching Blake Lively fighting against sharks in "The Shallows" from two summers ago, but there's still enough of interest to keep the new nautical drama "Adrift" afloat. And of course it is always refreshing to see a film where a female protagonist isn't passively waiting for a rescue. Overall it is an entertaining film with a solid dramatization of real events.

Plot - good. Acting game - good. Mixing between past and present - also a good idea. So there're pretty good things about the movie. But the main problem is that the film is somehow slow (even though it's only 90 minutes) and the last half an hour was boring. I wouldn't watch it again but I don't regret spending time on it so I would say the IMDb raiting is definitely too low.