On the surface, writer/director J.C. Chandor’s second film couldn’t be more different to his debut Margin Call, an excellent ensemble drama depicting the 2008 Wall Street meltdown. But look closer and you’ll see evidence of an auteur at work. Both films benefit from a brutal consistency of time and place, and both pit their protagonists against an immutable force – be it the financial crash or, in this case, the unforgiving ocean.
Redford plays “our man”, a yachtsman sailing “1,700 nautical miles from the Sumatra Straits” when his boat is breached by a stray shipping container. From the moment he wakes to see water sloshing beneath his hammock, we (and he) know he’s screwed. The tension comes from establishing just how badly.
Whereas Margin Call was busy with business talk, All Is Lost is – bar one of cinema’s greatest swears – essentially wordless. There’s nothing to say, and no one to say it to, just one man, alone, against nature. He’s not even particularly emotive, why else would he be sailing solo? Indeed, Redford’s impressive stoicism makes Gravity seem like a Goodfellas of conviviality in comparison.
All process, and no personality, the result is one of the purest action films ever made: methodical, minimal, stripped of all ballast. Because it doesn’t ask – or offer – anything beyond endurance, some will find it difficult to engage with. But whereas Gravity couldn’t resist a half-baked search for meaning, Chandor’s films know that, when faced with the worst, there’s nothing left but do or die.
