FILM · 2013
All Is Lost
Robert Redford, one man, one boat, almost no dialogue - and a sailing film that respects its audience.
A yacht in the Indian Ocean, holed by a drifting shipping container. One sailor - Redford, the film's only cast member, credited simply as "Our Man" - and a script that famously ran about 31 pages, most of them silence.
What follows is the most procedurally honest sailing film ever made: fothering the hull, hand-pumping, celestial navigation from a paper almanac once the electronics drown, the step-by-step arithmetic of a liferaft drifting toward a shipping lane.
It premiered at Cannes, took an Oscar nomination for sound editing, and won the Golden Globe for Alex Ebert's score - but its real achievement is trusting the audience to read the situation the way a sailor has to: from the evidence.
Every sailor watches it the same way - silently auditing Our Man's decisions against their own. That's the film's genius. It makes you crew.