All Is Lost **** (2013, Robert Redford) – Movie Review

The 77-year-old Robert Redford is stupendous under gruelling filming conditions as a solo sailor, who wakes to find his yacht taking on water after a collision, in the 2013 survival film All Is Lost.

The 77-year-old Robert Redford is tremendous under what look like gruelling filming conditions as an unnamed solo sailor, who wakes to find his 39ft yacht taking on water after a collision with a rogue shipping container left floating in the Indian Ocean.

Things go from bad to worse. He’s soon sailing unknowingly into the path of a violent storm. Each time, the ever resourceful Redford responds valiantly. He patches up the leak. Somehow he survives the storm and uses a sextant and nautical maps to chart his progress along ocean currents that will carry him into a shipping lane to hail a passing boat.

He seems like the ultimate survivor. But there are just some things you can’t survive. The human body can put up with only so much. And then, All is Lost. Having to abandon the yacht for safety in a rubber life-raft, with the sun unrelenting, sharks circling and his meagre supplies dwindling, Redford finds he’s staring death in the face.

Playing the man with no name and no script to speak, Redford didn’t have to learn many lines, other than maybe ‘help’ and, just once astonishingly, ‘***k’. (It turns out that the film has 51 spoken English words. Redford is sole cast member.)

It’s very clever to have virtually no dialogue, character, back story or explanations. It gives the movie quite an unusual spin, dynamism and power. All the concentration is on the physical, Redford’s action, reactions and the creases in his old, old face. He emerges with huge dignity and respect in one of his best-ever performances. He might look wrinkly, but he must be incredibly fit, in top physical shape as the role demands. It feels like Redford’s testing himself. If so, he passed the test.

Writer-director J C Chandor films incredibly realistically and excitingly, in a nailbiting survival movie that’s as gritty as Captain Phillips and as sick-to-the-stomach tense as Gravity. The movie’s a huge credit and triumph to Chandor.

The main surprise though is Redford. Anyone could have played this role, young or old, man or woman, black or white, gay or straight. It’s an everyperson role, for heaven’s sake. But Redford makes it his own. He makes it seem actually written for him, even if it wasn’t. He’s stupendous in it, and it wouldn’t be half the film it is without him.

Redford won the New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Actor, and was nominated for the Golden Globe Award and Critics’ Choice Award. Alex Ebert won the 2014 Golden Globe for Best Original Score. The film was also nominated for an Academy Award for Best Sound Editing.

It was shot over two months in mid-2012 in the water tank at Baja Studios in Rosarito Beach in Mexico, originally built for the film Titanic (1997), with a couple of days’ filming in the actual ocean.

It premiered at the Cannes Film Festival on May 22, 2013 and was released on October 25, 2013 (North America).

It runs 105 minutes.

Chandor’s previous film was Margin Call (2011) with Zachary Quinto and Kevin Spacey. In 2014 Chandor directed Oscar Isaac and Jessica Chastain in A Most Violent Year. In 2015 he directed  the crime film Triple Frontier. In 2024 he directed Kraven the Hunter for Sony’s Spider-Man Universe.

Chandor met Redford at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival, where Margin Call was premiering and asked him to star in the film.

Robert Redford (August 18, 1936 – September 16, 2025)

© Derek Winnert 2013 Movie Review

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