Film Review: ADRIFT

The doomed lovers at sea.

What do you do when it's snowing outside, there's a pandemic going on, you're sick with a cold and you just bought a new 65-inch TV? Clearly, you settle in for some big-screen viewing. Since I was alone I got to choose anything, and the more distracting the better. This led me to Adrift, a 2018 romance/adventure based on a true story and resulting book. It stars Shailene Woodley and Sam Claflin as young lovers Tami and Richard who endure a harrowing experience in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.

Hired to sail a luxury yacht from Tahiti to San Diego for a fee of $10,000 and airfare home to wherever, the couple see it as a grand adventure. Until, of course, the hurricane hits, which explains the title of the film. Adrift opens after the disaster has hit and jumps back and forth between the postcard meeting and courtship of the pair five months earlier and the horrible post-storm reality: Richard is gone, having been swept overboard, and Tami is alone, drifting at sea for 41 days, living on peanut butter, hallucinating that Richard is alive, and blah-blah-blah. Despite it being a true story and at its heart quite an exciting tale, the film's telling of it is somehow fairly predictable and, dare I say, boring. 

What's not boring is the storm, which is quite impressive and reaffirms Hollywood's uncanny ability to transport us from our humdrum lives to wholly other worlds. Watching Adrift in my cosy heated house, I was thankful I only had a cold, that it was only snowing a little and that I still don't have Covid. So in one sense, it was a great therapy session. If you're seeking a way to feel better about your own life, this film does it. Otherwise, I'd suggest searching for "The Making of The Impossible" on YouTube. It's much more fun and explains how the magic happens.